Pianists: The Artist as Culture Hero

Van Cliburn is not only a major pianist of the younger generation, but a culture hero as well—right up there with the Beatles and Marshall McLuhan.

Contrary to the more conventional patterns of the music business, he makes fine music that also sells. In the ten years since he won the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, he has sold 3,000,000 albums—more than 1,000,000 of them the version of the Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto that vanquished Moscow. His collection, My Favorite Chopin, has been on the classical bestseller lists for 138 weeks.

Sensing the Currents. Now RCA has released Cliburn’s first recording in two years: Chopin’s Second and Third Piano Sonatas. Why so long between disks? The reason is that Cliburn has been growing increasingly finicky about his work in the studio. “During these two years,” he says, “I’ve probably cut another half-dozen pieces that I’ve rejected. To me, a record is so permanent that I must be very careful of what I release.”

He need not worry about his new album. Cliburn’s natural equipment is just right for Chopin. He has a powerful and precise technique, a gift for tracing long, soaring lines out of detailed figurations, and an innately tasteful musicality that spurns either maudlin moonbeams or brittle bravura. He puts it all to work in the Byronic B-Minor Third Sonata, playing with dash, sweep and refined lyricism. His performance of the Second, in B-flat minor, offers something more. Although not the performance of a mellow master like Rubinstein, it displays a subtle feeling for the shifting, subterranean currents of Chopin’s emotion. There is an urgency in the scherzo, a brooding pathos in the famous funeral march, a bizarre mysteriousness in the final skittering octaves, which Anton Rubinstein described as the winds of night blowing over churchyard graves.

Keeping the Momentum. Cliburn, now 34, has not always played so well in recent years. In Manhattan alone, three of his appearances in the past two seasons—especially a performance of Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with the New York Philharmonic in May—were considerably off his best form.

Some of Cliburn’s admirers believe that such lapses—as well as the lengthening pauses between record releases—result from the strain of trying to be both an artist and a commercial phenomenon in the music business. To keep up the momentum that started in Moscow in 1958, Cliburn plays a punishing concert schedule of well over 100 appearances a year. At fees that start at $7,500 for a solo appearance, this means that he makes something like a million dollars a year, including record royalties —although he coyly denies that he is rich (“Heavens, no!”). Furthermore, the travel, the friendship of the famous, the adoring crowds and the publicity are heady stimulation to someone who is instinctively a performer. “I’m not the kind of person who would want to confine himself to playing in his own salon,” Cliburn admits.

Evading the Question. But is this kind of headlong, exhausting career compatible with the study, reflection and artistic growth required by a talent such as Cliburn’s? He alone really knows the answer. Occasionally he has spoken to friends about cutting down his schedule, taking a rest. Yet he is now booked through October 1970, with no respite in sight. And in his excessively reserved public statements, he does not like to concede that a possible conflict exists. He waves away the difficulties of being a culture hero with vague talk of “good experience” and “weighing one factor against another.” Asked whether a pianist in his 30s—no longer a newcomer, not yet a grey eminence—faces crucial decisions about the direction of his career, he evades the question with a borrowed quip: “Fritz Kreisler once said that between 25 and 35 you’re too young to do anything well; after 35 you’re too old.”

Still, Kreisler’s own achievements late in his career indicated that he did not believe that. Cliburn’s achievements so far indicate that he should not believe it either. After all, performances as impressive as his new recording of Chopin sonatas show that he is neither too young nor too old to do something very well indeed.