Van Cliburn

Van Cliburn was homosexual and had a long term domestic partner, Thomas Zaremba. Zaremba had once unsuccessfully filed a palimony suit against Cliburn claiming a share in his vast income and assets.

He suffered from advanced bone cancer during his later years and died on 27 February, 2013 at the age of 78.

The Van Cliburn International Piano Competition was created by the National Guild of Piano Teachers as a living tribute to the great artist upon his win and the first competition was held in 1962. The competition is held every four years.

Van Cliburn was born in Louisiana to Harvey Lavan Cliburn, an oil company executive, and Rildia Bee O'Bryan Cliburn, a classical pianist. At the age of three he began playing the piano by himself.

His mother, a former student of the great Arthur Friedheim started giving him piano lessons and he developed a rich voice tone as he learnt to sing each piece.

He won a statewide piano competition at the age of 12 which enabled him to make his debut with the Houston Symphony Orchestra.

At the age of 17, he went to the Juilliard School in New York and studied under Rosina Lhevinne. He was trained in the tradition of the Great Russian romantics.

Cliburn grew up to be a young man with exceptional talent and won the highly prestigious international Leventritt Award when he was just 20 years of age and made his Carnegie Hall debut.

He participated in the first ever International Tchaikovsky Competition held in 1958 in Moscow—an event held to demonstrate the cultural superiority of the Soviet Union during the cold war. He gave a scintillating performance in the competition and created an international sensation by winning it.

After returning to New York, he repeated his celebrated performances at the Carnegie Hall with the conductor Kirill Kondrashin who had conducted his prizewinning performances in Moscow.

Impressed by his success, RCA Victor signed him to an exclusive contract. His first album with them was the recording of The Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No.1 with conductor Kirill Kondrashin which went on to sell more than three million copies.

Cliburn traveled all over the Soviet Union and played in several international concert halls between 1960 and 1972, and made numerous recordings of major piano concerts which were often televised. His love for the Soviet Union was warmly reciprocated by the people there.

His biggest achievement was the winning of the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958 when the cold war was at its peak and the relations between the Soviet Union and America were strained. His win served as an ice-breaker and promoted better cultural relations between the nations.

His recording of the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1 was the first classical album to go platinum; it eventually went multi-platinum with sales of more than three million copies. The recording won him the 1958 Grammy Award fro Best Classical Performance.