ON a billboard in front of Manhattan's Carnegie Hall is a picture of a blue-eyed, shock-haired Texan, partly obscured by a green-lettered streamer: SOLD OUT. Long before the concert was scheduled, Berlin-based Musicologist Paul Moor, a onetime professional pianist himself, went to Moscow to cover the Tchaikovsky International Competition for TIME, soon began to file glowing reports about 23-year-old Van Cliburn's performances, and his triumph as a winner of the first piano prize. At the request of Cliburn's parents, Moor became a kind of ex-officio manager of Van's, traveled with him constantly, collecting research and protecting him from the constant demands on his time. The two soon found that they had a lot in common: Moor grew up in Texas not far from Van; each had studied piano with a pupil of Arthur Friedheim's, who in turn was a pupil of Liszt's. For this week's cover story, Moor sent TIME'S editors the tapes of the prizewinning Moscow performance, and 60 pages of research on life with Van Cliburn. Meantime, correspondents in the U.S. and Western Europe talked to the people who had been close to Van: his parents, his teachers, his childhood friends, his musical associates. In Manhattan, Music Editor Richard Murphy and Researcher Rosemarie Tauris (whose husband is a conductor) interviewed musicians, managers, Juilliard teachers and friends. For Dick Murphy's story about the music sensation of the year, see Music, The All-American Virtuoso.

ONCE when old Georges Clemenceau was accused of bringing down one French government after another, he retorted: "But it's always the same government." Perhaps it was then, but is it now? For TIME Correspondent Godfrey Blunden's report on the tensions that grip Frenchmen as they search for a government--and their place in the 20th century -- see FOREIGN NEWS, Paris in the Spring.

IN the foyer of the splashy, freshly decorated new Lunt-Fontanne Theater, champagne flowed at intermissions for white-tied first nighters. But onstage, the gifted Lunts offered not their usual sparkling comedy but a dour drama about man's injustice to man, by fast-rising Swiss Playwright Friedrich Dueurrenmatt. The Visit, says TIME'S review, is "as incredible and surrealist, yet as bluntly precise and compelling, as a dream." See THEATER.

TO learn firsthand the story of Errett-Lobban Cord's emergence as a Nevada politician, TIME'S Los Angeles Bureau Chief Frank McCulloch flew into Reno, got the onetime auto tycoon's consent to a half-hour interview. But the meeting continued 5 1/2 hours because Cord, now an Esmeralda County rancher, discovered that McCulloch had been raised on a ranch in Nevada's Lyon County. For what Returning Native McCulloch learned, see NATIONAL AFFAIRS, The New-Model Cord.

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