Texan's piano performance thawed Cold War tensions

Editor’s note: This story about pianist Van Cliburn is adapted from the book “Texas Ingenuity” by Alan C. Elliott and printed with the author’s permission. Van Cliburn died Wednesday. He was 78.

Six months after the Russian launch of Sputnik on Oct. 4, 1957, tensions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union edged toward a breaking point. In Moscow, a young American pianist named Van Cliburn sat at the keyboard of a Steinway piano to play Tchaikovsky’s “Piano Concerto No. 1” and Rachmaninoff’s “Piano Concerto No. 3” at the First International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition.

Unaware of what role his participation would have in world affairs, he mesmerized his audience in one of the first live concerts televised in the Soviet Union. The Russian people were spellbound by the lanky Texan. He didn’t fit the Communist Party’s description of the evil American. In fact, he looked rather friendly.

With the last note still reverberating in the concert hall, the Russian audience exploded into applause and gave Cliburn a standing ovation lasting eight minutes. The Soviet judges had to ask Premier Nikita Khrushchev for permission to award Cliburn the top competition’s prize. How could he be denied? The premier gave his permission.

Van Cliburn not only became an instant celebrity in Russia, this Texan’s southern graciousness and friendly demeanor thawed the relations between the two superpowers.


Born in 1938, in Shreveport, La., Harvey Lavan Cliburn, Jr. (shortened to Van Cliburn) came from a Lone Star family tree longer than a country mile. The booming oil business had taken his father out of the state temporarily, but they would return to Kilgore in a few short years.

While his father worked in the oil business, Van’s mother, Rildia Bee O’Bryan Cliburn, taught piano lessons. As a toddler, Van watched the succession of his mother’s students come in and out of their house with interest. He delighted to hear his mother practice and listened with intense curiosity. He also watched carefully as students learned their daily lessons. One day after his mother left the room, Van sat on the piano bench and started playing the music that the last student had been practicing. When his mother returned, she knew he had a musical talent, but was determined that he would be properly trained.

At the age of 3, Van started learning piano from his mother — daily lessons without fail. And these weren’t lessons from the typical Hal Leonard Method books for young fingers. Not from Rildia Bee! His mother had studied under Arthur Friedheim, a student of the famous pianist Franz Liszt, and could have been a successful concert pianist if the door had been open for young women in that era. From his mother/teacher, Van learned how to read music, how to sit correctly, how to caress the keys, and how to interpret music. She made sure he didn’t develop any bad musical habits.

Music tutoring in the Cliburn household went beyond piano lessons. His mother and father drove Van from Kilgore to so many concerts in Dallas and Shreveport that when asked once where he lived, he said, “On highway 80.” Van played for his school choirs, community events and church functions. All the while, he took lessons from a piano teacher who told him, “While you are taking lessons from me, I am not your mother.” She demanded significant daily practice and Van, with few reservations, met her demands with enthusiasm.

By the time he was in junior high school, Van stood almost his full height of 6 feet, 4 inches and his large hands gracefully and skillfully covered any reach the music required.

By the age of 12, Van won a statewide Texas piano competition and played with the Houston Symphony. At the age of 14, he won a National Music Festival Award and played in Carnegie Hall.

The awards kept mounting up for young Cliburn. He hurried to finish high school at the age of 16 so he could get on with a professional piano career. At 17, he entered the prestigious Julliard School of Music in New York.

His mother carefully selected a teacher who could take Van to a higher level of professionalism. That teacher, Madame Rosina Lhevinne, had graduated from Moscow Conservatory with highest honors, and some consider her the most influential piano teacher of her generation. When she first met Van, she refused to take him on as a student, saying that her schedule was too full. Then she heard him play. She rearranged her schedule and Van grew into her most promising pupil. Under Lhevinne’s inspired tutelage, Van won several national competitions and gained the experience to compete internationally.


To understand the significance of what happened at during his trip to Russia, you need to know about the events of October 1957.

Since the end of World War II, the United States and Russia (then the communist Soviet Union) had both stockpiled a large number of nuclear weapons. The fear on each side led to a “cold war” of high tension, fueled by spy versus spy intrigue and inflammatory political rhetoric. This increasing anxiety drew the “free west” and the “communist east” to the brink of mutual annihilation. By 1957, although each country had a massive arsenal of nuclear weapons, the delivery of them to the enemy was a crude proposition. Each country knew that the next move was conquering space, where weapons could be dropped on the enemy from above.

All hope of a peaceful future depended on developing space technology before the Soviets. The U.S. tried to fire rockets into space several times and each one blew up in failure. Then, in a crushing blow, America lost the space race Oct. 4, 1957. On that day the Soviets successfully sent the world’s first satellite, Sputnik, into space orbiting the Earth. Americans were frozen in fear. Could (and would) the Russians drop atomic bombs on the U.S. from space? Schools practiced atomic bomb drills. Suburban Americans dug fallout shelters in their backyards in a desperate search for safety. Geiger counters (to locate radioactivity) could be purchased at any American department store.

Six months after the Russian launch of Sputnik, with tensions on both sides edging toward a breaking point, a young Van Cliburn entered the First International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow. When he won the hearts of the Russian people, as well as the competition, he returned to the United States a hero.


In New York City, the tall and friendly Texan received a huge ticker-tape parade in New York City, the only classical musician ever to earn that prestigious honor. Time magazine featured him on their cover and called him “The Texan Who Conquered Russia.” He signed a recording contract with RCA and his recording of Tchaikovsky’s “Piano Concerto No. 1” became the first classical album to sell more than 1 million copies. It remained the worldwide best-selling classical album for over a decade.

For the next 20 years, Van Cliburn reigned as the superstar of classical music. In 1962, he and other Texas music lovers and community leaders established the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Fort Worth, and put Texas on the classical music map. This prestigious “super bowl of piano competitions” is held every four years and attracts the best musicians from around the world.

Van Cliburn is remembered as an effective, influential and respected Texan ambassador. His support for the growth of the arts in Texas, his nourishment of young talent, and his influence on arts and educational causes around the globe will remain a lasting legacy.