Music: The All-American Virtuoso

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"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.