The All-American Virtuoso
(See Cover)
"Ah swear to goodness, ah just can't believe all this is happenin' to li'l ole Van Cliburn from the piney woods of East Texas!" Most everybody agreed with Van. Through a rare combination of sheer talent, the tension of the cold war and the thunderous amplifier of modern publicity, the long-legged 23-year-old winner of Moscow's International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition (TIME, April 21) had overnight become the object of the most explosive single outpouring of popular acclaim ever accorded a U.S. musician. Next week Manhattan will give him a national hero's welcome back to the U.S. with a ticker-tape parade up Broadway. He will go to Washington to be received by the President of the U.S. His first post-Russia concert (in which he will repeat his Moscow prizewinning pieces: Tchaikovsky's Concerto No. 1, Rachmaninoff's Concerto No. 3) has swamped Carnegie Hall with the heaviest demand for tickets in all its glittering history.
As Van mops up his one-Texan conquest of the Soviet Union this week, the Russians have to look back a century for a comparable triumph. That was when Franz Liszt, history's most vaunted piano virtuoso (and the teacher of the man who taught Van's first teacher--his mother), made his debut in St. Petersburg. Wearing Pope Pius IX's Order of the Golden Spur over his white cravat, his immaculate dress coat clanking with his other medals, his "shapely white hands" encased in doeskin gloves, he appeared, tossing his shoulder-length blond hair, before an audience of 3,000, who greeted him with "thunderous applause such as had not been heard in Russia for over a century." The pianist who has been evoking that sort of reception for a month from Riga to Kiev is a far cry from the saturnine dandy with the "Florentine profile." Van Cliburn is a gangling (6 ft. 4 in., 165 Ibs.), snub-nosed, mop-haired boy out of Kilgore, as Texan as pecan pie. Instead of medals, he carried a well-thumbed Bible; instead of doeskin gloves, a single dress shirt, a plastic wing collar given to him by a friend, a ratty grey Shetland sweater that often showed under his dress jacket when he took his bows.
Maverick. In the tradition-filigreed world of highbrow music, the Texas longhair is a maverick who conforms to nobody's image of a virtuoso. His family has been American on both sides for at least four generations. His pale baby face, with its cornflower-blue eyes beneath a tangle of yellow hair, might suggest a choir boy--which he has been. He is exuberantly gregarious, unsophisticated and, on the surface at least, totally untempera-mental. Former Cincinnati Symphony Conductor Thor Johnson recalls that once, in an orchestral tutti during the rehearsal of a concerto, Van rose from the keyboard and walked out. "I called a halt to the music," says Johnson, "and wondered what we could have done to upset the kid." Just then Van looked back over his shoulder from the wings and drawled: "Go right ahead. Ah'm just goin' to the slot machine for a candy bar." He can be considerate to a fault. In Moscow, one of his American friends had to lock him into his hotel room before he dropped from exhaustion receiving the glad-handers and autograph seekers who streamed in all through the night.
Deeply religious, and a conscientious teetotaler, he is a twice-over tither; i.e., he gives 20% of his net earnings to the Baptist Church. During Evangelist Billy Graham's Manhattan crusade last year, Van sang in the Madison Square Garden choir alongside Ethel Waters. He once skipped a $500 concert date so that he could play for a church banquet in Paramus, NJ. Buffalo Philharmonic Conductor Josef Krips recalls the time that Van came into his dressing room before a performance and said, "Maestro, let us pray." Krips, a Roman Catholic, dropped to his knees with the pianist. Said Van: "God give us his grace and power to make good music together."
"Genius." Irreverent sophisticates of the concert halls may laugh at Van--but not when he sits down to play. Pianist Sviatoslav Richter, whom the Russians regard as their best, dubbed Van "a genius --a word I do not use lightly about performers." In tears of emotion Pianist Emil Gilels grabbed Van as he came off the stage after playing Rachmaninoff's Third Concerto, bussed him soundly on both cheeks. To Composer Aram Khachaturian, Van was "better than Rachmaninoff; you find a virtuoso like this only once or twice in a century." France's Marquis de Gontaut-Biron, a frequent judge of piano contests, found that Van had "almost the technique of Horowitz during his prime, and he has everything Horowitz always lacked." Raved Britain's Sir Arthur Bliss: "He plays with fire and poetry, and gives vitality to every phrase." More cautious, U.S. Conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos feels that Van "could rise to Rubinstein's stature, but at the moment it's not fair to compare them." Says Piano Critic Abram (Speaking of Pianists) Chasins: "Van is a born flaming virtuoso."
Pianist Cliburn's great talent is nothing new to knowing U.S. musicians and critics; for all the fanfare, the Russians did not "discover" him. In 1954 he won the Leventritt Award for young pianists and string players--a far tougher prize than the Tchaikovsky Gold Medal. Although the Leventritt competition is held annually, no prize had been awarded for five years because no entrant was judged up to it. Playing to some of the keenest musical ears in the world, Van took the prize hands down. After that, he was known as a comer in musical circles from one end of the country to the other.
More important, Cliburn is no isolated U.S. phenomenon, as suggested in a party-processed statement by Russian Composer Dmitry Shostakovich: "Musical circles in the United States have a right to be proud ... of their young countryman, especially since until now the musical successes of that country resulted not from the efforts of Americans but of famous performers of European countries." Van's victory dramatically underscored that there is more first-rate native instrumental talent in the U.S. than in the whole of Europe. Moreover, the talent is younger. In Cliburn's generation there are at least nine pianists of equal native ability: Byron Janis, 30, Gary Graffman, 29, Seymour Lipkin, 31, Jacob Lateiner, 30, Claude Frank, 32, John Browning, 24, Eugene Istomin, 32, Leon Fleisher, 31, and Canada's Glenn Gould, 25, who has played widely in the U.S. By contrast, Europe has a small handful of young pianists --Austria's Friedrich Gulda and Paul Badura-Skoda, Poland's Andrzej Czajkow-ski. and France's Phillipe Entremont--who are in the same class. The younger pianists are hitting their stride just in time to fill the places being left by an older generation. Some of the Americans are almost sure to step into the shoes of the Backhauses, the Rubinsteins, the Ser-kins, the Giesekings and Horowitzes.
Gusher. U.S. artists have consistently won impressive triumphs abroad since World War II, and this summer, with a record number of American musicians touring, they will dominate the European musical scene. In 1952 Pianist Fleisher won first place at Belgium's Queen Elisabeth Concours against far tougher competition than Cliburn faced in Russia. In 1956 Pianist Browning (a Leventritt Award winner in 1955) came within a sixteenth note of taking first in the same competition, finally took second to Russia's Ashkenazy. This summer there are even two other Texas pianists--Ivan Davis, 25, who won first place at last month's Naples competition, and James Mathis, 24. And at the Tchaikovsky Competition itself, U.S. Artists Joyce Flissler, who took seventh in violin, and Daniel Pollack, 23, who took eighth in piano, won ovations that were overlooked abroad in the groundswell of Cliburn publicity.
Bah KanooepH or "Van Cleeberrrn," as the Russians call him (he pronounces it "Cligh-burn") has been Topic No. 1 in Russia for a month and a gusher of warm good will that has had more favorable impact on more Russians than any U.S. export-of word or deed since World War II. Ironically, the U.S. embassy was probably the last stronghold in Moscow to become aware of Van's coup; U.S. Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson and his wife had not even made plans to attend Van's finals audition until they were convinced by American contestants that to fail to appear would be a major blunder. And the committee of the Martha Baird Rockefeller Aid to Music Program, which paid the fare to Moscow for Van and the other Americans, had pledged the contestants to secrecy on the theory that their presence in Russia would be politically unpopular back home.
The love affair between Van and the Russians started sizzling when he appeared in the preliminary auditions--and never let up. Wooed by official Russia and by musicians, he was also pursued by adoring teenagers. Total strangers, men and women, hugged and kissed him in the street, flooded him with gifts, fan mail, flowers (one bouquet came from Mrs. Nikita Khrushchev). Women cried openly at his concerts; in Leningrad, where fans queued up for three days and nights to buy tickets, one fell out of her seat in a faint. When Moscow TV scheduled only the first half of Van's prizewinning performance, the advance protest from Muscovites was so furious that the station scheduled the whole recital, plus encores. Thereafter, in each of the four cities where Van played on his Russian tour, his performance was broadcast on local TV and radio. Russians by the millions have learned to spot Van's most distinctive trademark--his great shock of springy blond hair. (He tried unsuccessfully all during his Russian visit to slick it down with hair cream and train it down with a nylon stocking drawn over his head, tight as a bathing cap.)
Exaltation. The Russians dote on the image of agonized exaltation that Van presents at the keyboard. He usually stares before him, his head tilted back at a 45-degree angle, his body leaning far back from the keys. In lyric passages he shakes his head from side to side in a kind of slow frenzy at the grip of the music upon him. In the more fiery passages he crouches close over the keys, his face scowling, his elbows jutting far behind him, like the legs of a praying mantis. When the orchestra is playing alone, he eyes the conductor with mounting eagerness, works his shoulders, finally addresses himself to the piano with the gawky excitement of a colt.
His technical equipment is superb. The enormous hands cover a twelve-note span. He has a dazzling warmup technique of playing swift scales in octaves and tenths with his hands crossed, a trick that he says does wonders to develop the left hand. When a friend told him about big-handed Soviet Pianist Richter's trick of playing tenths and simultaneously playing thirds between thumb and forefinger, Van immediately duplicated it, commented, "Aw, that's not hard." He plays Rachmaninoff's Third Concerto with the cadenza that the pianist-composer rewrote for his own performances because it was too difficult.
But Van's artistry is the kind that begins where technique leaves off. His expressiveness ranges from ghostly sonorities and harplike trills to ringing double octaves that cleave the orchestra like a sword. He can shape passages with tension and excitement, turn the weariest warhorse into a spirited charger. He is not above rewriting, as in the chorale section of Chopin's C Sharp Minor Scherzo, where he fills out the harmonies with extra notes ("I think Chopin would forgive me").
Van takes a no-nonsense view of his own playing, grows rapturous when he thinks he is in form ("Faultless!"), but can be equally tough on himself when he thinks he is not ("Did you ever hear such lousy piano playing in your whole life?"). He can be equally hard on other players; e.g., he scorns Sergei Prokofiev's old recording of his own Third Concerto: "Sorry, but it's just not Russian."
Tears. Politically uncalculating, Van pleased his hosts by doing what comes naturally. He never played fewer than five encores; he sat down at a piano everywhere and at the slightest provocation any hour of the day or night. He insisted on playing the whole of his Leningrad program at a rehearsal several hours before the evening concert for the benefit of conservatory students unable to buy tickets. When he visited Tchaikovsky's grave in Leningrad, he delighted his guides by taking some Russian earth back with him, plans to use it to plant a Russian lilac cutting at Rachmaninoff's grave near Valhalla in New York's Westchester County.
Repeatedly, the Russians' adulation moved Van to unashamed weeping. After an eight-year-old boy came forward after a concert in Riga and shyly presented a photo of himself, Van took it back to the hotel, felt so touched on looking at it again that he broke down and cried. After his final audition for the competition, he burst into tears when a friend repeated to him Soviet Pianist Richter's statement that "his playing excites and moves me as only very few of the greatest have been able to." Later, at a Richter recital, Van sobbed all through the first movement of the Schubert B Flat Sonata. Toward the end of his visit, he confided to a friend what the Russian experience had meant to him. "I tell you," he said, "these are my people. I guess I've always had a Russian heart. I'd give them three quarts of blood and four pounds of flesh. I've never felt so at home anywhere in my whole life."
Idol. Certainly, Van never felt entirely at home in the small, dusty East Texas town nestled in a forest of oil derricks where he grew up. He was born Harvey Lavan Cliburn Jr., in Shreveport, La., an only child, in the eleventh year of his parents' marriage. His father is a minor oil-company executive with a modest income, his mother a talented piano teacher who studied in New York with Liszt's longtime pupil, Arthur Friedheim. She was on the verge of making her debut under her maiden name, Rildia Bee O'Bryan, when her mother intervened and forbade her a concert career.
Van started studying with his mother when he was three. Long before he could read words, he learned to read notes. At four, he appeared in his first public recital at Shreveport's Dodd College, playing Bach's Prelude in C Major. When he was six, the family moved to Kilgore, Texas (pop. 10,500). His father, who had hoped Van might be a medical missionary, decided he was headed for a musical career after all, had a studio built for him on the back of the garage, equipped it with a piano. The boy practiced for an hour before going to school, again when he came home and again after dinner--except on the four evenings a week that he went to prayer meetings with his parents. Rachmaninoff was his idol. When Van was twelve, he decided he would win a gold medal in Moscow because Rachmaninoff had been awarded one when he graduated from the Moscow Conservatory.
"Hell." At a plump twelve, he made his orchestral debut with the Houston Symphony as a winner of a statewide young pianists' competition, played Tchaikovsky's B Flat Concerto. The same year he played in Carnegie Hall as the Texas winner of the National Music Festival's nationwide competition to uncover talented junior soloists. Mamma Cliburn ferried him out to California to play for Jose Iturbi, and Iturbi promptly proclaimed him "the most talented youngster I've heard in the U.S."
His mother thought he should be exposed to other teachers, but Van stubbornly refused. When he was 14, Mrs. Cliburn was taking master's classes at Juilliard, and Olga Samaroff,* a famed teacher at the school, offered Van a scholarship. But Pianist Samaroff died before he could start, and he refused to study with anybody else. In one volcanic scene with his mother, he threatened to give up the piano entirely if he was forced to go through with the Juilliard plans ("I always threatened her with that whenever she tried to give me away to another teacher"). They moved out of the New York apartment they had taken and went back to Kilgore.
There Van was a favorite of his teachers and a good, although never brilliant, student. His only major interest besides the piano was acting (he still talks vaguely of going on the stage). He was excused from physical education classes because of the damage they might do to his hands. Says one of his contemporaries: "He never had any trouble having a good time. He was a good dancer. He was one of the most congenial boys in school." But Van was also as much a maverick in smalltown Texas as he was later to seem on the international concert circuit. Childhood and adolescence, outside his family, he remembers as "a living hell." He had reached his full 6 ft. 4 in. (size 12 shoes) by the time he was 14, and he was excruciatingly selfconscious; he is still convinced that he has "no looks." More important, Van was a musician. "You can't love music enough to want to play it," he says, "without other kids thinking you're queer or something."
Extravert. When he graduated from high school in 1951, at 17, Van headed for Manhattan and a scholarship at Juilliard. Russian-born Pianist and Juilliard Teacher Rosina Lhevinne answered a knock at her studio door one day to find it filled with Van's rawboned frame. "Honey," he announced, "Ah'm goin' to study with you." It was the first time she had heard the name Cliburn, but she invited him in and asked him to play. Says Mrs. Lhevinne: "Right then I said. 'This is an unbelievable talent.' His mother had taught him very well indeed." She took him as a pupil, and he took the Juilliard's "diploma," or conservatory course (as opposed to the "degree" course, which requires 60 semester hours of academic courses) to leave himself time for concertizing.
His Juilliard friends recall him as an easygoing, extraverted Texan of undeniable instinctive talents, but limited intellectual interests. Says a fellow pianist: "He never even talked music or seemed to think about it much when he was away from the piano." Now and again he even let his practicing slide; his mother periodically called him from Kilgore to urge him to practice, or called Manager Arthur Judd of Columbia Artists Management to tell him to get after Van. For a while he was informally engaged to a tall, lissome brunette from back home named Donna Sanders, who was studying voice at Juilliard, but they broke it off after a year when Van decided he was not yet ready to reconcile marriage with a career. Donna, who later won small singing roles on Broadway, where she married an actor, thinks Van did the right thing: "That's the way it should be for someone of his capabilities." (Van's explanation: "I think I have too much affection to give ever to be able to give it all to only one person.")
Break. Cliburn's big break came when he won the Leventritt Award. "We were sitting there," recalls one Leventritt judge, "when in walks this tall, mad-looking fellow, sits down and plays--of all things--Liszt's Twelfth Rhapsody. He bowled us right over. Ordinarily, the judges would not even seriously consider anyone who played a spectacular piece like that. But it was obvious that this was an enormous raw talent; they don't come any bigger." His playing of a far more demanding repertory clinched his victory. When it was announced, he grabbed the daughter of Rosalie Leventritt, the stately dowager who sponsors the contest, and joyously waltzed her around the room before the startled judges. The next day he appeared at Mrs. Leventritt's Park Avenue apartment. "Honey," he said, thrusting a bunch of red roses at her, "Ah'm just a babe at your doorstep."
By the terms of the award, Van made his debut with the New York Philharmonic and four other major orchestras. Raved Louis Biancolli of the New York World-Telegram & Sun: "This is one of the most genuine and refreshing keyboard talents to come out of the West--or anywhere else--in a long time." In his first post-Leventritt season (1955-56) Van played 30 concerts, appeared with such major orchestras as the Cleveland, the Buffalo Philharmonic, the Denver Symphony and the Detroit Symphony.
Then Van fell prey to the rigors of the "concert jungle." The second season after the Leventritt Award he had only two-thirds as many concerts; the next season he played virtually none. There were some personal reasons. First he expected to be inducted into the Army. At the last moment an Army medic discovered that he had persistent nose bleeds and declared him 4-F. Then, last summer, his mother broke a vertebra, and he went back to Texas to coach her piano students for six weeks. By that time it was too late to think of bookings for the winter season.
Pattern. The dwindling demand for Van's talents also followed a pattern familiar to other young instrumentalists: one big prizewinning season followed by relative obscurity. Most musicians blame the concert-management system for this state of affairs far more than they do the public. Between them, Columbia Artists Management, the National Artists Corporation and Impresario Sol Hurok control 90% of the soloists and instrumental groups touring the country. To the beginning artist, the Big Three offer irresistible bait: a chance to tour the country for pay and to build a reputation. But the reputations are built in New York, and the pay, when fees and traveling expenses are deducted, usually amounts to only several hundred dollars. An artist caught in the community-concert treadmill usually deserts the field after a few years or is nudged out by management on the theory that the public wants new faces.
Van was shocked by the hard facts of community concert life. His net income dropped to less than $3,000 a year (from a high of $8,000). He piled up $7,000 of debts, mostly loans that his parents made for him from the Kilgore National Bank. He took to such money-saving devices as playing classical music for his supper in Manhattan's Asti Restaurant.
While in Kilgore last fall, drilling scales into his mother's pupils, Van got a letter from Mme. Lhevinne suggesting that he enter the Moscow competition. He wavered awhile; his managers at Columbia Artists were cool to the idea, wanted him to go instead on a speculative, pay-your-way tour of Europe. But everybody he talked to thought he would win, and his eyes shone with the notion of taking the gold medal in Rachmaninoff's Moscow.
Victory. For two months, from the time he was accepted until he left for Moscow, Van shut himself away in his tiny Manhattan apartment on 57th Street across from Carnegie Hall and spent six to eight hours a day at his quilt-covered Steinway practicing the staggering repertory each entrant was expected to master. Plagued with colitis, he dutifully went in for dieting and rigorous physical conditioning, boosted his strength with massive doses of vitamins and six packages of Knox gelatin a day. Sundays he checked his progress with Mme. Lhevinne, or gave small private recitals for groups of friends. When he left for Moscow, his phone bill was unpaid and his Columbia Artists contract was running out, with no talk of a renewal.
When the big news of Van's victory broke from Moscow, one of the first congratulatory cables came from the Kilgore National Bank. Van broke into a slightly twisted smile. "Maybe," he said, "they have more cause to congratulate me than anybody else." Within hours Columbia Artists' Vice-President William Judd was on the transatlantic phone with honied words. In the first shock of becoming the hottest musical commodity in the world, Van shuttled between awe and the depressing idea of "all those people making money out of me." But as the offers came pouring in, he began to display flashes of a sound horse-trading instinct. When he heard that both Columbia Records and RCA Victor (and every other big record company) were scrambling to sign him, he told Judd to play them against each other, get him a contract "that'll guarantee that if I go in one day and want to play Clair de lune, they'll have to record it." Last week RCA Victor gave him one of the fattest contracts ever offered a young artist, with built-in guarantees for "longterm security." Within hours Van's concert fee jumped from $1,000 to $2,500 plus, shortly became a deal whereby Cliburn gets 60% of the receipts. Dallas outstripped everybody else by booking a concert from which Van stands to walk away with $9,000. Said the Dallas Symphony's President Mrs. Samuel Shelburn with a double helping of Texas pride: "We want to be the first to pay him his biggest fee."
Perils. In developing into the major artist most people think he will become, Van could be either helped or handicapped by his Moscow triumph. It has placed him in a position to command big fees and security; it has given him the freedom to play as little or as much as he pleases, and to pick his repertory. But at the same time it has cast him in a unique musical role. "He may be the first man in history," says a friend, "to be a Horowitz, Liberace and Presley all rolled into one." What some friends worry about is that in the easy flush of success Van might be tempted to keep on repeating himself in the showy, romantic repertory he handles so well, neglecting his powers to develop. Says Juilliard Dean Mark Schubart: "He needs to learn more Beethoven sonatas; he needs to work on Schubert, Schumann, Debussy and Ravel. This is no reflection on him; no artist that young knows 'em all." Says Sir Arthur Bliss: "If, like fine wine, he can mature slowly and somewhat secretly, he'll be a great artist. But if he's affected by the immense publicity he's gained, he'll be like many other prizewinners : he'll have a brief period of glory and be spoiled. I hope his friends will be wise enough to say, 'Now you mature.' "
Most of the people close to him agree with Critic Abram Chasins that, because his basic instincts are "those of a pristine musician," Van will survive the perils of his success. But U.S. music is unlikely ever to be the same again. "What he has given to it," says Pianist Eugene Istomin, "is glamour. He has reminded everybody that we are no longer a cowboy country musically."
Hurdle. Van's own plans include 45 U.S. concerts this summer and next season with 17 major orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, the Pittsburgh Symphony, the Minneapolis Symphony, the San Francisco Symphony, the Boston Symphony. Estimated gross income next season: up to $150,000. He hopes to play with the Philadelphia Orchestra at the Brussels Fair and again in Amsterdam, and with the London Philharmonic in Britain. He would like to devote more time to composition; so far he has written only two sentimental piano pieces, Nostalgia and The Void, but he is working on a piano concerto. In the fall he would like to return to Russia with his mother and tour the country, listening to its music and studying.
But before any of these things begin to happen Van Cliburn is bracing himself to clear one high hurdle. Late Monday afternoon, May 19, if he conforms to his usual ritual as a somewhat ailing health enthusiast, he will eat three raw eggs cracked into a glass with the yolks intact and swallowed in one agonized gulp. In the evening in his dressing room, he will dose himself from a staggering array of pills and nose drops. As a tension reliever, and because he thinks it helps clear his mind, he will sit down for several minutes bolt upright, put his hands on his knees, close his eyes, inhale four times in staccato gasps through the nose until his lungs are expanded to bursting, finally exhale through his nose in four staccato installments. Finally, he will pray. Then he will walk onstage at Carnegie Hall to play the toughest concert of his life.
-The judges: Rudolf Serkin, George Szell, Leonard Bernstein, Abram Chasins, Nadia Rei-senberg, Alexander Schneider, Lillian Fuchs, Leopold Mannes, Arthur Judson, Eugene Istomin. -Born Lucy Hickenlooper in San Antonio, she changed her name to cater to the U.S. predilection for foreign musical artists. From 1911, until her divorce in 1923, she also answered to the name of Mrs. Leopold Stokowski.
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