Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 20, 1994 TAG: 9403170079
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By DONNA PERLMUTTER NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: FORT WORTH, TEXAS LENGTH: Long
On this evening, as he does he often does, he is playing host to a late-night gathering of friends and musicians.
"Fads don't interest me," says Cliburn, who has a predilection for suits and ties (both always navy), for old-fashioned chivalry and for fresh-cut flowers in his sprawling three-story Tudor mansion in Fort Worth. "I belong to the 19th century, a time that celebrated beauty. That - thanks to my parents and, through them, the music - is where my roots are."
Upstairs, his 97-year-old mother, Rildia Bee Cliburn (the first name is pronounced RILL-dah), has retired for the evening. An accomplished pianist herself, she was her son's only piano teacher until he went to the Juilliard School at 17, and she has never ceased to be the most significant person in her only child's life.
This night, Cliburn's guests include the Russian pianist Yevgeny Kissin, who has just played a recital sponsored by Cliburn Concerts, which produces performances by noted musicians at Texas Christian University. The tall Texan with the courtly Southern manners raises his champagne glass, waxing effusive about the performance and cuing the others to join in the toast: Kissin's mother and teacher, who travel with him, and Cliburn's close friends Susan Tilley and Tom Smith.
It is midnight. Goodbyes are another five hours away. Only when his mother is particularly tired does she not join him. At 59, the pianist - who started performing in public again on a limited basis three years ago after a 11-year "intermission," as he calls it - still follows the nighttime regimen he began as a student in New York. Now, he has converted friends (and anyone who wants to visit him) to his sleep-a-day world.
In 1958, Cliburn won the gold medal in the first Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow and became the first classical musician whose record sales and fan clubs put him on a par with Johnny Mathis and even Elvis Presley. The only pianists to approach to Cliburn's renoun in those years, just after his return from Moscow, were Vladimir Horowitz and Arthur Rubinstein. His success came against the backdrop of the cold war and made him a national hero.
That image persists: Van Cliburn waving, amid ticker tape and marching bands, from an open car slowly making its way down Broadway. No other classical musician enjoyed similar mainstream fame, which continued as long as he performed.
When he withdrew from performing publicly in 1978, speculation abounded. Was it touring fatigue? Repertory burnout? Cliburn, unfailingly courteous and certainly gregarious, is quite willing to talk about why he left the stage, as he has before, but first things first: the house.
Cliburn, whose warm baritone is still colored by a faint drawl, takes his visitors through the first floor: an immense kitchen, its counters cluttered with clear plastic boxes containing single servings of food; a solarium, a library, a dining room, and a living room the size of a hotel lobby, with a sea of sofas, antique chairs and giant formal arrangements of roses.
Nine Steinway grands are stationed throughout the house. On a pedestal stands a bust of Rachmaninoff. And framed photographs are everywhere: Rildia Bee and Van. Van and Rildia Bee. His eyes adoring, her soft face tilted toward him and smiling. Others photos include those of Cliburn and Maria Callas, Cliburn and Sol Hurok, Cliburn and Nikita S. Khrushchev, Cliburn and the Ronald Reagans. One long table is crowded with easily a hundred photographs.
There are also old birthday decorations left hanging and a spun-sugar flower sculpture removed from a cake and preserved, Havisham-like, under glass. End of tour.
Cliburn lavishes money everywhere: on his namesake competition and other music organizations but also on schools and conservatories at which he has established scholarships. His holdings continue to grow, largely through what he calls his "real estate exchanges."
After that come his record sales (the latest release is an RCA CD of his earlier recordings of the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2 and the Beethoven "Emperor" Concerto). And, finally, the latest round of performances, which fetch around $125,000 each in arenas like Grant Park in Chicago, where he is to perform on June 18, with Leonard Slatkin conducting. After all, Cliburn says, "I always had planned to return."
But nothing quite equals his enthusiasm for other musicians. And while most musicians may keep a wary eye out for their rivals, Cliburn seems to revel in good music-making, no matter whose it is.
"I'm a great audience," he says.
Earlier on this particular evening he had sat in the auditorium at Texas Christian listening to Kissin. From time to time his left hand, fingers tensely splayed, would grasp his knee in a kind of kinetic response. At the end of a passage that moved him, he would sigh. And after the third in a group of four of Liszt's "Transcendental Etudes," he broke tradition, clapping and roaring his approval before the final etude.
It turns out that Cliburn had once tried to prepare that same difficult etude, but he was never satisfied with his playing. Hearing Kissin's rendition it inspired his spontaneous and very vocal glee.
"For me to sit back and experience that kind of artistry," he says, in part explaining how he could take a sabbatical from his career, "is to luxuriate in the music in ways impossible when you're the performer. As a child, my parents insisted I learn how to serve the table. `You cannot appreciate being served unless you know how to do it yourself,' they would tell me.
"Well, that's what my appreciation was all about - this fabulous virtuoso serving me, allowing me to bathe in the musical illusions he had taken such pains to create. Mother and Dad used to tell me not to waste a fingernail on jealousy. To enjoy, instead, all that others can offer and look deep in myself for what is unique there. Not be influenced by what is popular."
Certainly, interrupting his career was not a popular move. In 1974, after the death of his father, a director of Rildia Bee Cliburn's family oil business, he stopped accepting any new bookings. Within four years, his retirement was accomplished.
"It was the most natural thing in the world for me to do," he now says, deftly holding a cigarette behind his back. "I didn't need to be in public view as a reason for being. There's so much living to do and so many places my heart ached to be besides the stage. When a friend in New York would call me and describe Nilsson in `Salome,' I got sick over missing it, although when Tebaldi sang her last five performances - `Butterfly' - at the Met I kept leaving the road and flying in to be there."
After 20 years of touring, he and his mother initially lived in 14 rooms at the Salisbury Hotel on West 57th Street in New York. But finally, in 1987, they returned to Texas. Cliburn bought the Tudor mansion and its 18 acres in Fort Worth, "where so many of our friends, so many heart attachments are," he says. "You cannot know how good it feels to be like other people and say, `Yes, I can be there for dinner.' And to know that turnip greens and pot roast are just around the corner."
He seems almost suspended in a state of almost-boyish buoyancy and bonhomie. "I do everything from the heart," he says, "from personal conviction. If you try to find love by charting a course, you'll never find it. Everyone at Juilliard scoffed when I chose to play unfashionable Liszt or even Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff. And you can't imagine how they teased and ridiculed me for always beginning a performance with the national anthem."
He continues to play the national anthem at all of his performances. And he remembers his parents' advice: "Forget about everything you've left at home when you're somewhere else, and enjoy what's there. Just remember how to get home."
by CNB