To the Editors:
One must not only agree with Samuel Lipman’s article about the Van Cliburn contest (“What the Cliburn Contest Thinks of Pianists,” September 1985) but express thanks that for the first time a journal which is not intended primarily for musicians uncovers the absurdities of what went on there. Everything he writes, as far as I am able to judge, is accurate and important, except for a few details, such as that Leon Fleisher did have a career between 1952 and 1965, and that the great solo music for piano certainly includes the works of Mozart and of Liszt. But there are a number of other points to be added, judging from what I heard on public radio and watched on public television.

It was a disgrace, for instance, to have comedian Steve Allen announce the events on the radio, for he was not in the least adequately prepared. The performance of Mr. Corigliano’s piece elicited some comments from him that surely should have remained unspoken. Twice he translated Ravel’s “Noctuelles” (night moths) as “Night Pieces.”

More important than the choice of an announcer was the choice of the jury for the contest. Is it proper—notwithstanding their individual merits—to invite a retired newspaper critic and a retired orchestra manager to be members of the jury? (The retired orchestra manager was in this case also a former conductor, which probably compensates for his being a music manager, but he was not asked to be a member of the jury as a musician.)

I agreed with Mr. Lipman’s attack on the choice of pieces for the contestants, although the one redeeming factor was that each finalist had to perform a Mozart concerto. That the candidates had to play chamber music looks good on paper, but the way in which it was done served chamber music badly and failed to bring out the chamber music spirit in the contestants. By requiring a piano quintet with strings, a genre first employed by Schumann, the contest put the piano trios and piano quartets by the Viennese masters from Haydn to Schubert out of bounds. Moreover, as Mr. Lipman pointed out, rehearsal time was inadequate, so that—as far as I heard—metronomic playing replaced the give-and-take which gives chamber music performances their true character.

I hope therefore that Mr. Lipman will continue the good work and go even more deeply into the necessity for the reform of performance contests, or for their replacement by something better.

Konrad Wolff
New York City

To the Editors:
Samuel Lipman’s challenging piece reviewing the television program on the Seventh Van Cliburn International Piano Competition deserves comment from one whose role in the proceedings he mentions, and who was one of those responsible for the Competition’s organization.

To begin at the beginning: Mr. Lipman’s title, “What the Cliburn Contest Thinks of Pianists,” is misleading. He has deduced from the television program his own erroneous ideas of the purpose of the Van Cliburn Competition, which he sums up in the final two paragraphs of his piece.

I can assure Mr. Lipman that the organizers of this year’s Competition did not see its “survival as an institution as the highest good.” They had, on the contrary, foremost in their minds the need to find a first-prize winner “of musical authority and personal magnetism”—or rather, to find several winners with those qualities—and then to help to establish their careers.

Mr. Lipman quotes Stephen Potter’s advice to failed tennis players: “If you can’t volley, wear velvet socks.” I have a question: why should not one be able to volley and wear velvet socks at the same time? Mr. Lipman sneers at publicity—which he equates metaphorically with velvet socks—(“lavish but meretricious coverage”), and at hospitality (“the contestants’ wary gratitude for all the kindnesses about to be heaped on them by their hosts”), as if the organizers of the Competition and those who took part were in some way demeaned by allowing the one and accepting the other. However regrettable, we live in an era when successful careers in the performing arts generally require not only talent but a certain amount of trumpeting too. As for the implied criticism of hosts who open their homes to competitors and provide them with all kinds of care and attention, its churlishness is lamentable.

Let me not be misinterpreted, however: I would be the first to complain if I felt that publicity, hospitality or any inessential activity were encroaching on the conduct of the Competition. I ought perhaps to remind Mr. Lipman that the schedule, which stretches more than two weeks, consists of the following: two preliminary rounds, during which each competitor plays music for solo piano; a semifinal round consisting of an hour-long solo recital and a performance of a piano quintet; and a final round, comprising performances of two concertos, the first by Mozart or Beethoven, the second of a work written since 1800. The solo repertory required, by the way, includes music by all the composers singled out by Mr. Lipman as “great.” In other words, the Competition is designed to be a demanding test of competitors’ musicianship, musical versatility and stamina, all of which qualities are necessary for a successful young concert pianist in today’s overpopulated musical world.

The Competition is taken to task by Mr. Lipman for attempting to “emphasize the ‘international’ character of everything” by describing two of the jurors as each representing two countries. “Neither,” writes Mr. Lipman, “was in any real sense American.” It happens that both Maestro Arpad Joo and Dr. Wolfgang Stresemann are. American citizens, which would seem to be about as really American as you can get! By the rules of the Federation of International Music Competitions, of which the Van Cliburn Competition is an active member, the jury must consist of a majority of people from countries outside that in which the Competition is held. Mr. Lipman is of course right in his implication that the two jurors he mentions represent the cultural traditions of their native Hungary and Germany respectively. That is why they were chosen. They were introduced legitimately therefore as representatives of their countries of birth and adoption, not with any intention of aggrandizing the importance of the Competition.

To be further accurate, the first prize is described in the Van Cliburn Competition literature not simply as “in excess of $200,000,” as Mr. Lipman writes; the official wording states that its “total value … is estimated to be in excess of $200,000.” There is a difference: a large proportion of that money is earned by the gold medalist on the concert tours arranged for him (or her) by the Competition. I bring this up not to split hairs, but to explain one of the chief goals of the Competition, one that has escaped Mr. Lipman’s apparently uninformed analysis. The greater number of the 70-odd members of the Federation of International Music Competitions do not have the resources, once the Competition event is over, to further the careers of their winners. The Van Cliburn Competition, in recent years at least, has assumed an active role in arranging engagements for its winners with symphony orchestras and presenters of recitals in North America and Europe, and for their administration. Whether the effort is worthwhile will of course not be evident until the winners reach artistic maturity, at a time some years beyond the Competition. I wait with optimism; Mr. Lipman, no doubt, with apprehension.

Mr. Lipman disliked the technique which Bill Fertik, the writer/director of the television program, used as a device to show complete movements on the screen—or considerable portions of them at least—without concentrating on one competitor to the exclusion of his (or her) colleagues. (How many performances can be fitted, after all, into a 90-minute program?) I admire and applaud Mr. Fertik’s approach, but, unlike Mr. Lipman, I did detect “audible jumps” at the points where one competitor’s performance cut to another. Also unlike Mr. Lipman, I was able to hear differences in the sonic quality of the different pianos, and in the touch of the competitors. There were also differences in tempo, which seem to have escaped Mr. Lipman’s otherwise critical sensibilities.

It is appropriate to mention how the television program came into being, since Mr. Lipman devotes so much of his piece to it. Mobil Oil Corporation and Tandy Corporation/Radio Shack generously provided underwriting which made possible the most extensive radio and television coverage in the Van Cliburn Competition’s history. Bill Fertik was chosen as writer/ director of the television program, and although there was extensive discussion with the Competition organizers about its content, the concept and execution were primarily his. Except for the lack of identification of competitors and music performed—which has been remedied in a revised version to be distributed outside America, and, we hope, to be shown again over the PBS network—we applauded the final result wholeheartedly.

(Lest I seem to imply that Mr. Lipman is totally misguided, I must congratulate him on rating gold medalist José Feghali’s performance of the first movement of the Haydn E flat Sonata as “the best piano playing on the program to this point.”)

Mr. Lipman writes at length about the concerto performances. I’m sorry that he was not in Fort Worth—at least I assume from his piece that he was not—to enjoy the Mozart or Beethoven concerto which each finalist played in addition to the one from the “virtuoso stockpile.” On the other hand, it might have reinforced his view that the “emphasis on concerto playing as the highest public criterion for winning contests” would speak even thicker “volumes concerning what contest managements feel their work is all about.” As I read further and further into Mr. Lipman’s piece I found myself wishing more and more strongly that he had picked up the telephone and asked Mr. Fertik about his conception of the television program, and myself what I believed the work of my colleagues and myself was all about.

Enough of details. What is ultimately distressing about Mr. Lipman’s piece is the technique he uses: his criticism having been made, the reader is then assumed to have accepted Mr. Lipman’s premises as factual, and his conclusions, as proclaimed in the final paragraphs without a twinge of doubt, as therefore proved. It is a shoddy technique. For my part, I would have enjoyed a dialogue with Mr. Lipman about the serious problems facing organizers of competitions, since he has obviously done some research and given the matter superficial thought at least. It is sad that his piece is so misleading.

Mr. Lipman has alas demonstrated that on this tennis court it is he who cannot volley; but I must compliment him on his glibness by admitting that the velvet of his socks is of the most extravagant and sumptuous quality imaginable.

Andrew Raeburn
Executive Director
Van Cliburn Foundation

Samuel Lipman replies:
Van Cliburn Foundation Executive Director Andrew Raeburn (who, by the way, will be leaving his position at the beginning of January, in the words of the Forth Worth Star-Telegram, “to form his own consulting company”) has a curious idea of how a critic ought to offer judgment on what he sees before his eyes. For Mr. Raeburn, the role of a critic of a given television program is not to watch and respond to what is on the television screen, but rather to assume that defects will be corrected in the future, and that the producers’ good intentions—at least to hear them tell it—should determine how the critic watches, what the critic hears, and what the critic writes.

Thus Mr. Raeburn, in reassuring us that the competition organizers were happy with the television program—was there ever any doubt?—writes:

Great news for music lovers, who will not be told to what and to whom they are listening; equally great news for the contestants, who will now have a chance to profit in their careers from the reaction of the viewing audience. But the television program I—and the American viewers—saw did not have this necessary identification. I cited this in my article and I do so again, as evidence of the contest sponsors’ and administrators’ lack of concern with musical values.

I am pleased that Mr. Raeburn would have enjoyed a “dialogue” with me about what he thinks his work and that of his colleagues is all about; I can well understand that Mr. Raeburn found himself wishing that I had discussed Bill Fertik’s “conception of the television program” with that gentleman. But, in my opinion, there is all too much music criticism being done these days with the assistance of just such private discussions and self-justifying interventions. The content of the Cliburn television program, I repeat, was just what it was on the screen, no more and no less. It certainly did not consist of either Mr. Raeburn’s or Mr. Fertik’s a posteriori justifications.

And so we are left with the questions which Mr. Raeburn does his best not to answer. Why did the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition present a television program to American music lovers which in the main did not identify either performers or repertory, which did not allow even one movement of a musical artwork to be played through by the pianist who began it, and which spent more time on such trivial contest formalities as the contestants’ being welcomed at the airport, their drawing of lots for their performances, and the introduction of the judges to the audience than on the final-round performance of the winner? My article attempted an answer: the Cliburn contest cared more for itself than for its contestants and the music they played. In my opinion, Mr. Raeburn’s defense suggests I was right.

I thank Konrad Wolff for his kind words. Mr. Wolff’s agreement with the main thrust of my article is all the more welcome to me because he was a student of the great Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert pianist Artur Schnabel, and is the author of a fascinating book on that artist, The Teaching of Artur Schnabel (Praeger, 1972). Just to clear the record, I should add that I did not say that pianist Leon Fleisher did not have a career. I said that he did not have a great career. To deserve that appellation, a career must be long in duration and attract a large audience, or importantly influence musical life; the very talented Mr. Fleisher’s career sadly did none of these.