In the spring of 1958, months after Sputnik, the Soviet Union hosted the first International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow to showcase its cultural superiority. The winner was a 23-year-old from Texas. This episode explores how Van Cliburn got there: born in Shreveport in 1934 and raised in the oil town of Kilgore, he was taught by his mother, Rildia Bee, whose own teacher Arthur Friedheim had been a pupil of Franz Liszt. At Juilliard he studied with Rosina Lhévinne, absorbing the Russian romantic tradition he would later reflect back at Moscow audiences with total authenticity.

We recount the finals, where Cliburn played Tchaikovsky’s First and Rachmaninoff’s Third and earned an eight-minute standing ovation, and the moment the paralyzed judges asked Nikita Khrushchev for permission to award the prize to an American. Back home he received a ticker tape parade in New York, the only classical musician ever to do so, and his RCA recording of the Tchaikovsky concerto hit number one on the Billboard chart and became the first classical album to go platinum. We also cover his 4 a.m. practice habits, the losses of 1978 that led to a near decade-long hiatus, the 1996 palimony lawsuit, and his 1987 return to the White House to play for Reagan and Gorbachev.

• How his mother taught him to make a percussive instrument sing
• Why a piano competition became a proxy battle of the Cold War
• Khrushchev’s reported question to the judges: is he the best?
• The Time magazine cover, the Grammy, and competing with Elvis and Sinatra on the charts
• Playing for every president from Truman to Obama and receiving top honors from both the US and Russia