Van Cliburn won the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958.
Van Cliburn,
the American pianist whose first-place award at the 1958 International
Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow made him an overnight sensation and
propelled him to a phenomenally successful and lucrative career, though a
short-lived one, died on Wednesday at his home in Fort Worth. He was
78.
His publicist, Mary Lou Falcone, confirmed the death, saying that Mr. Cliburn had been treated for bone cancer.
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Courtesy of the Van Cliburn Foundation, via Associated Press
Van Cliburn was the first musician to receive a New York ticker-tape parade, in 1958.
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Time Life Pictures - Getty Images
After he won in Moscow, Time called Van Cliburn “the Texan who conquered Russia.”
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Chang W. Lee/The New York Times
Van Cliburn last year with the 100-year-old Steinway concert grand that he grew up playing.
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James Hill for The New York Times
MUSICAL ENVOY In Moscow in 2011 to serve as the honorary chairman of the International Tchaikovsky Competition.
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Sergey Ponomarev/Associated Press
PERFORMER In Moscow in 2004 playing at a memorial concert.
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Steve J. Sherman
TEACHER In 1988 with his mother, Rildia Bee O’Bryan Cliburn, with whom he studied.
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Courtesy of Van Cliburn Foundation, via Associated Press
BEARHUG Mr. Cliburn with Nikita S. Khrushchev after winning the competition in Moscow in 1958.
Mr. Cliburn was a tall, lanky 23-year-old, hailing from Texas, when
he clinched the gold medal in the inaugural year of the Tchaikovsky
competition. The feat, in Moscow, was viewed as an American triumph over
the Soviet Union at the height of the cold war. He became a cultural
celebrity of pop-star dimensions and brought overdue attention to the
musical assets of his native land.
When Mr. Cliburn returned to New York he received a ticker-tape
parade in Lower Manhattan, the first musician to be so honored, cheered
by 100,000 people lining Broadway. In a ceremony at City Hall, Mayor
Robert F. Wagner proclaimed that “with his two hands, Van Cliburn struck
a chord which has resounded around the world, raising our prestige with
artists and music lovers everywhere.”
Even before his Moscow victory the Juilliard-trained Mr. Cliburn was a
notable up-and-coming pianist. He won the Leventritt Foundation award
in 1954, which earned him debuts with five major orchestras, including
the New York Philharmonic under Dimitri Mitropoulos. For that
performance, at Carnegie Hall in November 1954, he performed the work
that would become his signature piece, Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No.
1, garnering enthusiastic reviews and a contract with Columbia Artists.
At the time, Mr. Cliburn was part of an exceptional American
generation of pianists in promising stages of their own careers, among
them Leon Fleisher, Byron Janis and Gary Graffman. And the Tchaikovsky
competition came at a time when American morale had been shaken in 1957
by the Soviet Union’s launching of Sputnik, the world’s first artificial
satellite.
The impact of Mr. Cliburn’s victory was enhanced by a series of vivid articles written for The New York Times
by Max Frankel,
then a foreign correspondent based in Moscow and later an executive
editor of the paper. The reports of Mr. Cliburn’s progress — prevailing
during the early rounds, making it to the finals and becoming the
darling of the Russian people, who embraced him in the streets and
flooded him with fan mail and flowers — created intense anticipation as
he entered the finals.
In his 1999 memoir, “The Times of My Life and My Life With The
Times,” Mr. Frankel recalled his coverage of Mr. Cliburn’s triumph in
Moscow: “The Soviet public celebrated Cliburn not only for his artistry
but for his nationality; affection for him was a safe expression of
affection for America.”
Mr. Frankel said he had “posed the obvious question of whether the
Soviet authorities would let an American beat out the finest Russian
contestants.”
“We now know that Khrushchev” — Nikita S. Khrushchev, the Soviet
premier — “personally approved Cliburn’s victory,” he wrote, “making Van
a hero at home and a symbol of a new maturity in relations between the
two societies.”
Mr. Cliburn was at first oblivious to the political ramifications of the prize.
“Oh, I never thought about all that,” Mr. Cliburn recalled
in 2008 during an interview
with The Times. “I was just so involved with the sweet and friendly
people who were so passionate about music.” The Russians, he added,
“reminded me of Texans.”
The interview was conducted in conjunction with 50th-anniversary
celebrations of the Moscow competition. The festivities, sponsored by
the Van Cliburn Foundation, included a gala dinner at the Kimbell Art
Museum in Fort Worth for 1,000 guests, among them the Russian culture
minister and the Russian ambassador to the United States, who led a long
round of toasts.
Mr. Cliburn was a naturally gifted pianist whose enormous hands had
an uncommonly wide span. He developed a commanding technique, cultivated
an exceptionally warm tone and manifested deep musical sensitivity. At
its best his playing had a surging Romantic fervor, but one leavened by
an unsentimental restraint that seemed peculiarly American. The towering
Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter, a juror for the competition,
described Mr. Cliburn as a genius — a word, he added, “I do not use
lightly about performers.”
Drawbacks of Early Success
But if the Tchaikovsky competition represented Mr. Cliburn’s
breakthrough, it also turned out to be his undoing. Relying inordinately
on his keen musical instincts, he was not an especially probing artist,
and his growth was stalled by his early success. Audiences everywhere
wanted to hear him in his prizewinning pieces, the Tchaikovsky First
Concerto and the Rachmaninoff Third. Every American town with a
community concert series wanted him to come play a recital.
“When I won the Tchaikovsky I was only 23, and everyone talked about
that,” Mr. Cliburn said in 2008. “But I felt like I had been at this
thing for 20 years already. It was thrilling to be wanted. But it was
pressure, too.”
His subsequent explorations of wider repertory grew increasingly
insecure. During the 1960s he played less and less. By 1978 he had
retired from the stage; he returned in 1989, but performed rarely.
Ultimately, his promise and potential were never fulfilled, but his
great talent was apparent early on.
Harvey Lavan Cliburn Jr. was born in Shreveport, La., on July 12,
1934. His mother, Rildia Bee O’Bryan, a pianist who had studied in New
York with Arthur Friedheim, a longtime student of Liszt, had hoped to
have a career in music, but her mother forbade it. Instead she married
Harvey Lavan Cliburn, a purchasing agent for an oil company, a laconic
man of moderate income.
An only child, Van started studying with his mother when he was 3. By
4 he was playing in student recitals. When he was 6 the family moved to
Kilgore, Tex. (population 10,500). Although Van’s father had hoped his
son would become a medical missionary, he realized that the boy was
destined for music, so he added a practice studio to the garage.
As a plump 13-year-old Mr. Cliburn won a statewide competition to
perform with the Houston Symphony and he played the Tchaikovsky
concerto. Thinking her son should study with a more well-connected and
advanced teacher, Mr. Cliburn’s mother took him to New York, where he
attended master classes at Juilliard and was offered a scholarship to
the school’s preparatory division. But Van adamantly refused to study
with anyone but his mother, so they returned to Kilgore.
He spoke with affecting respect for his mother’s excellence as a
teacher and attributed the lyrical elegance of his playing to her. “My
mother had a gorgeous singing voice,” he said. “She always told me that
the first instrument is the human voice. When you are playing the piano,
it is not digital. You must find a singing sound — the ‘eye of the
sound,’ she called it.”
By 16 he had shot up to 6 feet 4 inches. Excruciatingly
self-conscious, he was excused from athletics out of fear that he might
injure his hands. He later recalled his adolescence outside the family
as “a living hell.”
On graduation at 17 he finally accepted a scholarship from Juilliard
and moved to New York. Studying with the Russian-born piano pedagogue
Rosina Lhevinne, he entered the diploma rather than the degree program
to spare himself from having to take 60 semester hours of academic
credits. Even his close friends said he displayed little intellectual
curiosity outside of music.
Winning the Leventritt award in 1954 was a major achievement. Though
held annually, the competition had not given a prize in three years
because the judges had not deemed any contestant worthy. But this panel,
which included Rudolf Serkin, George Szell and Leonard Bernstein, was
united in its assessment of Mr. Cliburn.
That same year he graduated from Juilliard and was to have begun
graduate-level studies. But performing commitments as a result of the
Leventritt kept him on tour.
In 1957 he was inducted into the Army but released after two days
because he was found to be prone to nosebleeds. By this point, despite
his success, his career was stagnating and he was $7,000 in debt. His
managers at Columbia Artists wanted him to undertake a European tour.
But Ms. Lhevinne encouraged him instead to enter the first Tchaikovsky
competition.
A $1,000 grant from the Martha Baird Rockefeller Aid to Music program
made the journey to the Soviet Union possible. The contestants’ Moscow
expenses were paid by the Soviet government.
A Darling of the Russians
The Russian people warmed to Mr. Cliburn from the preliminary rounds.
There was something endearing about the contrast between his gawky
boyishness and his complete absorption while performing. At the piano he
bent far back from the keys, staring into space, his head tilted in a
kind of pained ecstasy. During rapid-fire passages he would lean in
close, almost scowling at his fingers. On the night of the final round,
when Mr. Cliburn performed the Tchaikovsky First Concerto, a solo work
by Dmitry Kabalevsky (written as a test piece for the competition) and
the Rachmaninoff Third Concerto, the audience broke into chants of
“First prize! First prize!” Emil Gilels, one of the judges, went
backstage to embrace him.
The jury agreed with the public, and Moscow celebrated. At a Kremlin
reception, Mr. Cliburn was bearhugged by Khrushchev. “Why are you so
tall?” Khrushchev asked. “Because I am from Texas,” Mr. Cliburn
answered.
His prize consisted of 25,000 rubles (about $2,500), though he was
permitted to take only half of that out of the country. Immediately,
concert offers for enormous fees engulfed him.
His income for the 1958-59 concert season topped $150,000. His
postcompetition concert at Carnegie Hall on May 19, 1958, with Kiril
Kondrashin and the Symphony of the Air, repeating the program from the
final round, was broadcast over WQXR. He signed a contract with RCA
Victor, and his recording of the Tchaikovsky First Concerto sold over a
million copies within a year.
Reviewing that recording in The Times in 1958, the critic Harold C.
Schonberg wrote, “Cliburn stands revealed as a pianist whose
potentialities have fused into a combination of uncommon virtuosity and
musicianship.” Yet Mr. Schonberg had reservations even then: “If there
is one thing lacking in this performance it is the final touch of
flexibility that can come only with years of public experience.”
An idolatrous biography, “
The Van Cliburn Legend,”
written by the pianist and composer Abram Chasins, with Villa Stiles,
was published in 1959. Mr. Chasins used Mr. Cliburn’s Moscow victory as a
club to attack the American cultural system for neglecting its own.
Nothing could diminish Mr. Cliburn’s popularity in the late 1950s. He
earned a then-stunning $5,000 for a pair of concerts at the Hollywood
Bowl, and played with the Moscow State Symphony at Madison Square Garden
for an audience of over 16,000.
Yet as early as 1959 his attempts to broaden his repertory were not
well received. That year, for a New York Philharmonic benefit concert at
Carnegie Hall conducted by Bernstein, Mr. Cliburn played the Mozart
Piano Concerto No. 25, the Schumann Concerto and the Prokofiev Third
Concerto. Howard Taubman, reviewing the program in The Times, called the
Mozart performance “almost a total disappointment.” Only the Prokofiev
was successful, he wrote, praising the brashness, exuberance and
crispness of the playing.
Reviewing a 1961 performance of Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto by Mr.
Cliburn with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy, Mr.
Schonberg wrote, “It was the playing of an old-young man, but without
the spirit of youth or the mellowness of age.” Mr. Cliburn performed the
Rachmaninoff Third Concerto yet again, with the Philadelphia Orchestra,
for the inaugural week of Philharmonic Hall (now Avery Fisher Hall) in
1962.
Despite the criticism, Mr. Cliburn tried to expand his repertory,
playing concertos by MacDowell and Prokofiev and solo works by Samuel
Barber (the demanding Piano Sonata), Chopin, Brahms, Beethoven and
Liszt. But the artistic growth and maturity that were expected of him
never fully came. Even as a personality, Mr. Cliburn began to seem out
of step. In the late 1950s this baby-faced, teetotaling, churchgoing,
wholesome Texan had fit the times. But to young Americans of the late
1960s he seemed a strained, stiff representative of the demonized
establishment.
A New Competition
Many subsequent pianists tried to emulate Mr. Cliburn’s path to
success through international competition victories. But a significant
number of critics and teachers took to castigating the premise and value
of competitions as an encouragement of faceless virtuosity, superficial
brilliance and inoffensive interpretations. Nevertheless, in 1962, some
arts patrons and business leaders in the Fort Worth area, to honor
their hometown hero, inaugurated the Van Cliburn International Piano
Competition. It remains the most lucrative and visible of these
contests.
In 1978, at 44, Mr. Cliburn, now a wealthy man, announced his
withdrawal from concertizing. He moved with his mother into a
magnificent home in the Fort Worth area, where he hosted frequent
late-night dinner parties.
As a young man Mr. Cliburn was briefly linked romantically with a
soprano classmate from Juilliard. But even then he was discreet in his
homosexuality. That discretion was relaxed considerably in 1966 when, at
32, he met Thomas E. Zaremba, who was 19.
The details of their romantic relationship exploded into public view
in 1996, when Mr. Zaremba filed a palimony suit against Mr. Cliburn
seeking “multiple millions,” according to The Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
Mr. Zaremba, who had moved to Michigan and become a funeral director,
claimed that during his 17-year relationship with Mr. Cliburn he had
served as a business associate and promoter and that he had helped care
for Mr. Cliburn’s mother, who died in 1994 at 97. The suit was
eventually dismissed.
Mr. Cliburn returned to the concert stage in 1987, but his following
performances were infrequent. The stress involved was almost palpable on
May 21, 1998, when, to inaugurate a concert hall in Fort Worth, Mr.
Cliburn played the Rachmaninoff Second Concerto with the Fort Worth
Symphony, suffered a memory lapse in the final movement and collapsed
onstage. He was given oxygen by a medical team backstage and taken to a
hospital.
“It was a massive panic attack,” a friend, John Ardoin, who was a
critic at The Dallas Morning News, said at the time. “It was sheer
exhaustion and nervousness. Van had given a solo recital two days
earlier, a really first-class performance, a black-tie affair with all
of the cultural and political officialdom of Texas in attendance, and he
was overwhelmed by it all.”
His
last public appearance was in September, when he spoke at a concert, at Bass Performance Hall in Fort Worth, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the
Van Cliburn Foundation. He is survived by Thomas L. Smith, with whom he shared his home for many years.
Mr. Cliburn leaves a lasting if not extensive discography. One
recording in particular, his performance of the Rachmaninoff Third
Concerto recorded live at Carnegie Hall on the night of his
post-Tchaikovsky competition concert, was praised by Mr. Schonberg, the
critic, for its technical strength, musical poise, and “manly lyricism
unmarred by eccentricity.”
Mr. Schonberg then added, prophetically, “No matter what Cliburn
eventually goes on to do this will be one of the great spots of his
career; and if for some reason he fails to fulfill his potentialities,
he will always have this to look back upon.”
****
Van CLIBURN plays RACHMANINOV 3d Concerto VIDEO Moscow 1958 (1-5)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apNTq-Tgf4w
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Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
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