A few months ago I heard Van Cliburn speaking on NPR. I got the link and see it was March. He said two things that I remember. First, he was already a musical kid at 4 years old when an opera came to Shreveport, Louisiana. His mother wanted him to hear it, so she took him to the dress rehearsal night. She didn't want him to have to sit through an entire actual performance. Well, Van Clibun ended up going to all three performances, too. He knew what he loved.
In the interview Van Cliburn dealt with the fact that his greatest fame came at 23 in the Moscow competition. I think that's right. Cliburn seemed to accept this. He said in so many words that he was a pianist's pianist. He was deeply in love with the music and was not able to step off the stage and into the audience. It was easier for other pianists to understand what he was doing, who know music, than an audience coming in off the street. Artists of Van Cliburn's degree of sensibility often deride the more popular artists who are able to please their audiences, as crowd-pleasers, but Cliburn didn't do that. He spoke with awe of Maria Callas. He said that Callas was able not just to sing and work hard on her singing but to sit in the audience and understand what the people were hearing. That ability of being in both places, he said, made her great; and he had not had it.
