Van Cliburn, Cold War Musical Envoy, Dies at 78

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Van Cliburn, Cold War Musical Envoy, Dies

By ANTHONY TOMMASINI 43 minutes ago

Mr. Cliburn won the top prize at the 1958 Tchaikovsky International Competition, a victory that was viewed as an American triumph over the Soviet Union. He was 78.

• Video: Van Cliburn Tribute | Photos: Remembering Cliburn

By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

Published: February 27, 2013 

Van Cliburn, the American pianist whose first-place award at the 1958 Tchaikovsky International Competition in Moscow made him an overnight sensation and propelled him to a phenomenally successful and lucrative career, though a short-lived one, died Wednesday morning in Fort Worth. He was 78.

Enlarge This Image

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Van Cliburn last year with the 100-year-old Steinway concert grand that he grew up playing. More Photos »

His publicist, Mary Lou Falcone, confirmed the death, saying that Mr. Cliburn had been treated for bone cancer and that he died at his home, which he shared with Thomas L. Smith, who survives him.

Mr. Cliburn, a Texan, was a lanky 23-year-old when he clinched the gold medal in the inaugural year of the Tchaikovsky competition, and 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 was given a ticker-tape parade in Lower Manhattan, which offered the sight of about 100,000 people lining the streets and cheering a classical musician. In a ceremony at City Hall, Mayor Robert F. Wagner proclaimed that Mr. Cliburn’s accomplishment was “a dramatic testimonial to American culture” and 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 Concert No. 1, garnering enthusiastic reviews and a contract with Columbia Artists.

At the time, America had produced an exceptional generation of pianists besides Mr. Cliburn who were all in promising stages of their own careers, among them Leon Fleisher, Byron Janis, Gary Graffman and Eugene Istomin. But the Tchaikovsky competition came at a historically important time: a period when American morale had been badly shaken by the Soviet Union’s launching of the world’s first orbiting satellite, the Sputnik, in 1957.

The impact of Mr. Cliburn’s victory was further 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 national anticipation as he went into the finals.

In his 1999 memoir, “The Times of My Life,” 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. My account of his rapturous reception landed on the front page of The Times two days before the pianist was crowned the contest winner because I 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, 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 Tchaikovsky prize.

“Oh, I never thought about all that,” Mr. Cliburn recalled in 2008 in 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 minister of culture 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 spanned 12 notes each. He developed a commanding technique, cultivated an exceptionally warm tone and manifested solid musical instincts. At its best, his playing had a surging Romantic fervor, but 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.”

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 concert stage; he returned in 1989, but performed rarely. Ultimately, his promise and potential were never fulfilled. But the extent of his 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, young 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). Though his father had hoped that Van would become a medical missionary, he realized that the boy was destined for music, so he had a practice studio added on to the garage.

As a plump 13-year-old, Mr. Cliburn won a statewide competition to perform with the Houston Symphony Orchestra and played the Tchaikovsky concerto. Thinking that he 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 other than his mother, so they returned to Kilgore.

He spoke with affecting respect of 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 his full adult height of six feet four inches. Excruciatingly self-conscious, he was excused from athletics out of fear that he might injure his hands. He would later recall his adolescence outside the family as “a living hell.”

Upon graduation at 17, he finally accepted a scholarship offer from Juilliard and moved to New York. At school he studied with the noted Russian-born piano pedagogue Rosina Lhevinne, and entered the diploma rather than the degree program to save himself from having to take 60 semester hours of academic credits. Even his closest friends later in his life said that Mr. Cliburn had little intellectual curiosity outside of music.

The Leventritt award in 1954 was a major achievement. Though held annually, the competition had not awarded a prize in three years because the judges had not deemed any contestant worthy. But this panel, which included musical luminaries like 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, including 20 appearances with orchestras during 1955 alone, 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 carrying a $7,000 debt. His managers at Columbia Artists wanted him to undertake a tour of Europe for which he would have had to pay his own travel expenses. But Ms. Lhevinne encouraged him instead to enter the first Tchaikovsky competition.

An award of $1,000 from the Martha Baird Rockefeller Aid to Music Program made the journey possible. Once in Moscow, the contestants’ expenses were assumed by the Soviet government.

The Russian people warmed to Mr. Cliburn from the preliminary rounds. There was something affecting about the contrast between his boyish, gawky manner 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 he performed the Tchaikovsky First Concerto, a solo work by Dmitry Kabalevsky (written as a required test piece for the competition) and the Rachmaninoff Third Concerto, the frenzied audience broke into chants of “First prize! First prize!” Emil Gilels, one 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 amount 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 1958, the New York Times 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 exposure.”

An idolatrous biography, “The Van Cliburn Legend,” written by the pianist and composer Abram Chasins, was published in 1959. Mr. Chasins used the story of Mr. Cliburn’s Moscow victory as a club to attack the American cultural system for neglecting its own. Reviewing the book in The Times, the novelist Robertson Davies called it a “gee-whiz-fellas biography of Our Boy Who Beat the Russkis.”

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 pension fund benefit concert at Carnegie Hall conducted by Leonard 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.” Of the Schumann he wrote that Mr. Cliburn provided “sentimentality rather than Romantic sentiment.” 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 American youths of the late 1960s he seemed a strained, stiff representative of the demonized establishment.

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, which became, and remains, the most lucrative and visible of these contests.

In 1978, at 44, Mr. Cliburn announced his withdrawal from concertizing. Having earned large sums of money and invested wisely, he was a wealthy man. He moved into a magnificent home in the Fort Worth area with his mother. There he hosted frequent late-night dinner parties, his teetotaling days long behind him.

As a young man, Mr. Cliburn was briefly linked romantically with a soprano classmate from Juilliard. But even then he was living a discreet homosexual life. His discreetness 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 1995, 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 consultant and business associate, arranging promotional events and trips, managing some of the pianist’s finances, and helping to care for Mr. Cliburn’s mother, who died in 1994 at 97. The suit was eventually dismissed because Mr. Zaremba could not provide written validation of his domestic arrangement with Mr. Cliburn, as required by Texas law.

Mr. Cliburn returned to the concert stage in 1987, but his performances in the following years were infrequent. The stress involved was palpable on May 21, 1998, when, to inaugurate a new 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 brought to a nearby hospital for tests.

“It was a massive panic attack,” a friend, the former Dallas Morning News critic John Ardoin, 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.

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 the critic Mr. Schonberg 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.COPY  http://www.nytimes.com