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Tears. Politically uncalculating, Van pleased his hosts by doing what comes naturally. He never played fewer than five encores; he sat down at a piano everywhere and at the slightest provocation any hour of the day or night. He insisted on playing the whole of his Leningrad program at a rehearsal several hours before the evening concert for the benefit of conservatory students unable to buy tickets. When he visited Tchaikovsky's grave in Leningrad, he delighted his guides by taking some Russian earth back with him, plans to use it to plant a Russian lilac cutting at Rachmaninoff's grave near Valhalla in New York's Westchester County.
Repeatedly, the Russians' adulation moved Van to unashamed weeping. After an eight-year-old boy came forward after a concert in Riga and shyly presented a photo of himself, Van took it back to the hotel, felt so touched on looking at it again that he broke down and cried. After his final audition for the competition, he burst into tears when a friend repeated to him Soviet Pianist Richter's statement that "his playing excites and moves me as only very few of the greatest have been able to." Later, at a Richter recital, Van sobbed all through the first movement of the Schubert B Flat Sonata. Toward the end of his visit, he confided to a friend what the Russian experience had meant to him. "I tell you," he said, "these are my people. I guess I've always had a Russian heart. I'd give them three quarts of blood and four pounds of flesh. I've never felt so at home anywhere in my whole life."
Idol. Certainly, Van never felt entirely at home in the small, dusty East Texas town nestled in a forest of oil derricks where he grew up. He was born Harvey Lavan Cliburn Jr., in Shreveport, La., an only child, in the eleventh year of his parents' marriage. His father is a minor oil-company executive with a modest income, his mother a talented piano teacher who studied in New York with Liszt's longtime pupil, Arthur Friedheim. She was on the verge of making her debut under her maiden name, Rildia Bee O'Bryan, when her mother intervened and forbade her a concert career.
Van started studying with his mother when he was three. Long before he could read words, he learned to read notes. At four, he appeared in his first public recital at Shreveport's Dodd College, playing Bach's Prelude in C Major. When he was six, the family moved to Kilgore, Texas (pop. 10,500). His father, who had hoped Van might be a medical missionary, decided he was headed for a musical career after all, had a studio built for him on the back of the garage, equipped it with a piano. The boy practiced for an hour before going to school, again when he came home and again after dinner—except on the four evenings a week that he went to prayer meetings with his parents. Rachmaninoff was his idol. When Van was twelve, he decided he would win a gold medal in Moscow because Rachmaninoff had been awarded one when he graduated from the Moscow Conservatory.