Mr. Cliburn giving a toast at an event at the Kimbell museum in Texas this month marking the anniversary of his victory. At right, Mayor Mike Moncrief of Fort Worth; at left, Aleksandr S. Sokolov, Russia’s culture
By ANTHONY TOMMASINI
FORT WORTH, Tex.
Van Cliburn, 50 years after his triumph in Moscow.
A HALF-CENTURY after meeting him, the Russian people still adore Van Cliburn. That was the message conveyed by Aleksandr S. Sokolov, the Russian minister of culture, and Yuri V. Ushakov, the Russian ambassador to the United States, during toasts at a black-tie dinner and musical tribute here on March 1. Sponsored by the Van Cliburn Foundation, the event commemorated the 50th anniversary of Mr. Cliburn’s victory in the first Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition in Moscow in April 1958.
Before nearly 1,000 guests in an elaborate 40,000-square-foot tent on the grounds of the Kimbell Art Museum, Mr. Sokolov read a message of congratulations from President Vladimir V. Putin, an honorary sponsor of the event, who could not attend. Mr. Ushakov paid tribute to the “two Van Cliburns,” as he put it: the proud Texan who conquered Russian hearts with his magnificent artistry and the honorary Russian who was mobbed by Muscovites on the streets hugging and kissing him amid shouts of “Van KLEE-burn!”
“You don’t have two heads,” Mr. Ushakov said, “but you have two souls and two hearts, and I propose a toast to both of you.”
Mr. Cliburn, 73, as trim, bright-eyed and effusive as ever, his bushy hair still thick though gray, looked overcome with emotion. He offered a few phrases of gratitude in well-practiced Russian, then delivered an endearingly rambling speech about “200 years of friendship between Russia and America,” starting with an exchange of warm letters between President Thomas Jefferson and Czar Alexander I.
But this had to have been a bittersweet evening for Mr. Cliburn, who for nearly 30 years has largely been missing from the classical music field that he electrified during his glory days. Many towering creative artists make their lasting contributions during their youths. Orson Welles and Tennessee Williams come to mind. Some might add the Beatles to that list.
Van Cliburn is another such artist. For a good dozen years he was the best known and most popular classical musician in the world. His recordings routinely sold in the hundreds of thousands. His success was hard won and much deserved. But over time the expectations that this cultural emissary and musical superstar faced were impossible to fulfill. His playing declined. After a dispiriting concert in Toledo, Ohio, in 1978, he announced that he was taking a sabbatical. By the late 1980s he had begun playing again, but infrequently. He left his New York apartment and moved to a spacious house in the suburbs of Fort Worth.
Reflecting on his current life during a visit to New York in January he seemed wistful but at peace. “I do play concerts from time to time,” he said. “I work at home quietly, go to the opera, hear concerts, see friends. I like making up now for what I was not able to have then. And I still have to practice.”
It is impossible to overstate the impact of Mr. Cliburn’s victory at the Tchaikovsky competition and its lingering effects today. That a classical music artist could attain film-star celebrity, a major touring career and a lucrative recording contract by winning an international competition provided, for better or worse, an enticing new pathway to instant success. Or so it seemed. This anniversary is an apt time to consider the fallout of this event on Mr. Cliburn’s career, the field of classical music and the world of cultural diplomacy.
There were prestigious competitions before the Tchaikovsky: the Queen Elisabeth International Music Competition in Brussels, for example, whichthe young pianist Leon Fleisher won in 1952. Mr. Cliburn, at 19, won the respected Leventritt Award in 1954, earning a Carnegie Hall debut playing what would become his signature piece, Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto, with the New York Philharmonic conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos.
But Mr. Cliburn’s victory in Moscow four years later was a phenomenon. It came at the height of the cold war and the dawn of the arms race. Six months earlier the Soviet Union had launched Sputnik I, the first space satellite, shaking the confidence of Americans. By inaugurating an international piano competition at a time when travel by foreigners to the Soviet Union was restricted, the regime was cracking open a door.
To this repressed society came a lanky, boyish 23-year-old Baptist from Kilgore, Tex., an only child whose father was an oil executive of moderate means and whose mother, a skilled pianist, had been his only teacher until he headed to the Juilliard School in New York at 17 to study with the renowned Russian pedagogue Rosina Lhevinne.
That Mr. Cliburn was so openhearted, guileless and sensitive — qualities that abounded in his playing — was a large part of his charm. Soviet cultural officials dubbed him “the real American Sputnik.” At a reception for the finalists he was bearhugged by Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev, a music lover who had been impressed by his playing since the second round, when Mr. Cliburn performed Chopin’s F minor Fantasy, a Khrushchev favorite.
Recalling the competition during the interview in New York, Mr. Cliburn said that at the time he was oblivious to the political ramifications of his triumph.
“Oh, I never thought about all that,” he said. “I was just so involved with the sweet and friendly people who were so passionate about music. They reminded me of Texans.”
To Americans demoralized by the cold war, Mr. Cliburn’s triumph offered vindication. One of our boys, an apple-pie Texan, went to Moscow and beat the Commies fair and square at their own game, playing concertos by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, no less.
Arriving back in New York, he was honored with a ticker-tape parade from the Battery to City Hall, with 1,200 marchers, mostly schoolchildren in bands. Some 100,000 people lined the streets to cheer the hero. Of course the acclaim was exhilarating to Mr. Cliburn. Yet there was something unreal about what was happening to him. At a news conference shortly after his arrival in New York, a reporter commented to the young hero that he must think of himself now as a big success. He answered, “I’m not a success, I’m a sensation.” This precocious young pianist knew that artistic success had to be earned over time. And, as he put it in the recent interview, he worried that he was a sensation only “for the moment.”
Cold War, Hot Pianist. Now Add 50 Years.
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But in the minds of the jurors, not to mention the passions of the Russian people, Mr. Cliburn’s victory in Moscow was clearly earned. The formidable pianist Sviatoslav Richter, one of the jurors, called him a genius, a word, he added, “I do not use lightly about performers.” When the jurors made official inquiries as to whether they would be permitted to award the prize to a non-Soviet pianist, Khrushchev himself intervened. “Is Cliburn the best?” he asked. “Then give him first prize.”
For those not old enough to have heard Mr. Cliburn in those years, there is his legacy of recordings, especially his classic account of the Tchaikovsky concerto with the RCA Symphony Orchestra conducted by Kirill Kondrashin, the Russian maestro with whom he had collaborated during the competition. This RCA release, recorded shortly after Mr. Cliburn’s return to the United States, was the first classical LP to go platinum. Then there is his live recording of Rachmaninoff’s Third Concerto with the Symphony of the Air, made at Carnegie Hall in May 1958, again with Mr. Kondrashin, one of the finest piano recordings ever made.
In those days Mr. Cliburn’s playing had virtuosic brilliance and an elegance that belied his youth. Romantic flair was balanced by directness and honesty. He could make melodic lines breathe and sigh without indulging in excessive rubato. There was a sure sense of musical architecture without a trace of stolidity.
Most of all, his music making sang, a value instilled in him by his mother, Rildia Bee O’Bryan. A gifted pianist, she had studied with the renowned Arthur Friedheim, a student of Liszt’s, at the Institute for Musical Art, later the Juilliard School. Naturally, she wanted a career. Naturally, her father, a Texas judge, forbade it.
“My mother had a gorgeous singing voice,” Mr. Cliburn 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.”
The lesson took hold. Mr. Cliburn, an opera buff and frustrated baritone, brought lyrical intensity to every element of his playing. Not just melodic lines but also inner voices and bass parts sang. Even in fiery passages like the relentless outburst of hard-driving chords in the stormy middle section of the first movement of the Rachmaninoff Third, while playing with fearless sweep and power, he managed to bring out the lyrical thread that runs through this daunting episode.
Music making involves a combination of instinct and intelligence. Though musical instincts can be nurtured, you have to be born with them. But you can acquire musical intelligence by working with veteran teachers and developing analytic perceptions.
Mr. Cliburn had powerful instincts. Still, even those who hailed his artistry in his youth noted that he had to acquire more intelligence and depth. His mentors might have insisted that he play chamber music with challenging colleagues, work with living composers on new music and develop relationships with major maestros. But he became the hottest property of America’s most powerful manager, Sol Hurok. Every American city with a decent orchestra wanted him to come and play the Tchaikovsky concerto. Every town wanted him to give a recital. How could he disappoint people?
To his credit he understood that he had to broaden and deepen his musical understanding.
He expanded his repertory more than he is typically given credit for. He made a rhapsodic recording of Samuel Barber’s Piano Sonata, for example, and proved his musicianship in recordings of Beethoven’s Fourth and Fifth Concertos with the eminent Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. His Beethoven playing is Apollonian and sensitive to the scores: perhaps too sensitive, to the point of being dutiful. But it was unfair pressure for a pianist in his 20s to have to make a lasting statement in these canonical works.
By the 1970s what had been self-effacing honesty in his playing sometimes came across as reticence. He could seem unengaged. As he explained recently, he had personal reasons for withdrawing. Both his father and the paternalistic Hurok died in 1974. The touring circuit increasingly became an isolating grind.
He described an exhausting day when he had played an afternoon recital in Minneapolis. That same afternoon Birgit Nilsson had sung the title role in Strauss’s “Salome” at the Metropolitan Opera.
Cold War, Hot Pianist. Now Add 50 Published: March 9, 2008
“When I got back to the hotel to change clothes and have dinner,” he recalled, “a friend called and said, ‘Van, you missed such a performance.’ I said to myself, ‘Life is too short.’ I was missing so much. When I won the Tchaikovsky, I was only 23, and everyone talked about that. 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.”
So he withdrew, stayed close to home in New York and finally had more evenings for opera. “People don’t know what that period meant to me,” he said, “emotionally, spiritually, mentally, just to hear those fabulous works.” At his home in Fort Worth, which he shares with a longtime friend, he has an honored status in the cultural community.
Long ago he established a deserved reputation as a tireless host of dinner parties that end when most people are waking up. The night before the celebration he gave a dinner for some 150 guests at his house. It went so late that Mr. Cliburn passed up a lunch the next day at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth for out-of-town dignitaries, including the Russian minister and the Russian ambassador.
Living in the city has enabled him to participate more in the work of the Cliburn Foundation. In 1958, just months after his Moscow victory, a group of music teachers and residents of Fort Worth announced their intention to start a competition named for Van Cliburn. So the foundation was formed, and it is also celebrating its 50th anniversary. The competition, held every four years, remains its most visible activity: a Texas-size endeavor with the biggest prizes on the competition circuit. Some 120 applicants, on average, are selected for preliminary screening auditions held at locations around the world. The top three winners receive $20,000 awards, and all six finalists are given management contracts for three years.
It could be argued that Mr. Cliburn’s Moscow victory spawned an industry of sorts, the modern musical competition, which has had a profound, and not benign, impact on musical education and career arcs. The case against competitions is easy to make: artistry at the piano cannot be measured and ranked. Inevitably juries will focus on the more quantifiable aspects of piano playing, like flawless technique and brilliance, since they are likely to disagree over more subjective realms of musicality and interpretation.
Among many musicians, teachers and critics the terms “competition technique” and “competition mentality” are often used as pejoratives. Even Mr. Cliburn, who is loath to say anything critical of anyone, admits that he does not like comparisons and would never feel comfortable giving rankings to contestants.
“I couldn’t do it,” he said. “I’ve never been on a jury. It would be the hardest thing ever for me to do. I’m too understanding of why a person did a passage this way instead of that way.”
Still, at its best, he said, a competition provides an “opportunity cycle” to young pianists. He is proud of the way the Cliburn Foundation nurtures its finalists. “We provide management,” he said. “We look after these young people.”
To judge the competition by the long-term success of its top-prize winners tells a mixed story. For example, Radu Lupu, who won in 1966, remains a major artist today, but there have also been flashy winners who burned out quickly and others who inexplicably failed to meet their potential.
The foundation rightly argues that if you look at the entire roster of finalists over the years, many valued artists have come through the ranks, like Christian Zacharias (second prize, 1973) and Christopher Taylor (third prize, 1993), a pianist of awesome intelligence.
During the festivities here last weekend, four former gold medalists — Olga Kern, José Feghali, Stanislav Ioudenitch and Jon Nakamatsu — paid musical tribute to the guest of honor. An archival video of the young Van Cliburn playing and singing (in Russian) the folk song “Moscow Nights” was screened for the guests. Suddenly the four gold medalists, seated at two pianos, started playing in sync with the video. Then they offered a rousing eight-hand rendition of “The Stars and Stripes Forever” amid a confetti shower as Mr. Cliburn beamed and looked teary.
Back in 1958 it was easy to imagine that Van Cliburn, given good health, would be around for the golden anniversary of his triumph, an elder statesman of classical music, and celebrate the occasion with concerts around the world, including his beloved Moscow. But on this festive night he seemed content.
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