Music: The Bs That Made Milwaukee

At Milwaukee’s General Mitchell Field one day last week, a landing airliner was greeted by a 100-piece high school band, a chorus of can-canning cheerleaders and a cluster of city officials. Out stepped Milwaukee’s Ralph Votapek, 23, to be greeted by Mayor Henry Maier. “For too long,” intoned the mayor, “Milwaukee has been symbolized to the rest of the nation only by beer and the Braves. Now, thanks to Ralph Votapek, we have added a third and very important B to our national honors—Beethoven.” He proclaimed Ralph Votapek Day and announced that Votapek’s name would appear in neon lights on the city-hall tower.

The recipient of all these honors had just won the first Van Cliburn International Piano competition, and with it the largest cash prize—$10,000—ever given a performing artist in the U.S. Votapek, a pupil of Cliburn’s teacher Rosina Lhevinne, had to beat out 45 contestants from 16 nations, including two fine Soviet pianists who finished second and third. A softspoken, shy young man, he played the Prokofiev Third Piano Concerto and the first movement of the Beethoven Fourth, singing his way into their reflective passages and kindling fire from their climaxes with an ease and fluidity that immediately impressed the judges.

With the whopping cash prize went various other rewards: a recital in Carnegie Hall, a concert in London’s Royal Festival Hall, a European tour, an S. Hurok-sponsored tour of the U.S., Canada and Latin America. For a time, Pianist Votapek did not know whether he could accept any of them: he was scheduled to be drafted, did not learn until week’s end that he had been deferred for a year.