Photo courtesy Texas Music Museum (1934----) Birthplace: Shreveport, LA Genre: Classical piano Other Sites: Van Cliburn Foudnation Home Page

At the 1958 First International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition, Russia and the World found out what Van Cliburn's teachers and fellow students at the Juilliard School had known all along: Van was ochen kharasho (very good). His Moscow triumph, both as the artist who won First Prize and as an audience favorite, continued when he returned to a hero's welcome in the United States. Nothing quite like it had occurred in the small world of classical music before. His arrival in New York City was more like that accorded a certain British rock band in the sixties, and his triumphal tour continued from city to city. Van Cliburn's recording that year of the winning piece, Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1, set a standard that has yet to be surpassed; the most popular classical piano recording ever, it has never been out of print.

Cliburn has always stressed the fact that he is a Texan. His father had a job in Shreveport at the time; and, as it says in his 1993 authorized biography by critic Howard Reich, "By the time Van turned six, the family had moved back where it belonged, to ... Kilgore."

So, how does one become an international-calibre pianist in Kilgore? By having the most amazingly gifted mom as a teacher. Rildia Bee Cliburn was not only a third-generation Texan, but a third-generation pianist who had studied in New York with a famous teacher who had studied with Franz Liszt, the super-star pianist-composer of the 19th century. And she was the only teacher Van Cliburn needed until he went off at the age of 18 to Juilliard, where he became the favorite student of the greatest piano teacher of her time, the Russian-born maestra Josefina Lhevinne.

Everyone described Van Cliburn as having a natural talent, but the hours of practice he put in were phenomenal. His fellow students at Juilliard told tales of his practicing until three in the morning. The results were impressive--between 1952 and 1958 he won all but one competition he entered, including the G.B. Dealey Award from the Dallas Symphony, the Kosciusko Foundation Chopin Scholarship, and the prestigious Leventritt, all before the age of twenty. At twenty he had played with the New York Philharmonic and the symphonies of most major cities (thanks to the Leventritt award). He also graduated with top honors from Juilliard.

Reviews were universally excellent, and Cliburn's career seem launched, until a series of accidents and impending military duty side-tracked him in 1957. When his name came up for the draft, Cliburn cancelled all engagements (the Army eventually excused Van from service because of his chronic nosebleeds). Later, both parents were hospitalized (Rildia Bee with a broken vertebra and his father with complications from an auto-bus collision) and Cliburn went back to Kilgore to take care of them.

But the Tchaikovsky Competition jump-started Cliburn's career again in 1958, causing an outpouring of American nationalistic pride and musical admiration that none of his previous wins had prepared him for. Moscow made Van Cliburn a celebrity, just as Liszt had been in the previous century. There was a tickertape parade in New York City, following a concert at Carnegie Hall that fully validated the Moscow win in the eyes of all who heard it.

Cliburn's concerts over the next few years were spectacularly well-received, as were his further recordings of repertory ranging from Mozart and Chopin's virtuoso solo music to a concerto by American composer Edward McDowell, as well as the standard Beethoven and Brahms. But the heart of his repertory has always been Russian, with the Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff concertos. All his recordings were artistic and commercial successes. Along the way he leant his name to Fort Worth's quadrennial Van Cliburn Competition, which has caused the whole world to sit up and listen to scores of young pianists.

Van Cliburn retired from the concert stage in 1978, after a twenty-four year career that took him to all the great concert stages. His retirement was planned over a four year period after his father's death in 1974 to have some time to himself and for his beloved aging mother. (They shared a Fort Worth mansion until her death in 1994.)

A White House concert in 1987 for the Gorbachevs and the Reagans led to speculation that Cliburn might return to the stage. That was finally accomplished in 1989 and has continued with concerts at measured intervals ever since, with recent concerts playing to sold out houses.