Harvey Lavan Cliburn, Jr. was born on July 12, 1934, in Shreveport, Louisiana, where his father, Harvey Lavan Cliburn, was working as a purchase and sales representative for an oil company. His mother, Rildia Bee O'Bryan Cliburn, was a piano teacher. She was to exert a major influence on the life and career of her only child.

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Rildia Bee Cliburn was a serious and talented pianist. She attended the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music and then the New York School of Musical Art, where she studied with Arthur Friedheim, who had been a pupil of Franz Liszt. The playing style that she learned and in turn taught to her son reflected the musical trends of the late nineteenth century.

Mrs. Cliburn hoped to be a concert pianist, but her parents considered such a career inappropriate for a woman, and so she went home to Texas and began giving piano lessons.

Van Cliburn started studying piano with her when he was three years old. By the age of four he was performing with a children's church group.

In 1941 the Cliburn family moved to Kilgore, Texas. Cliburn performed at various venues around the area, earning a reputation as a prodigy. At twelve he played Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto in B-flat Minor with the Houston Symphony Orchestra.

In 1951 Cliburn entered the Juilliard School, where he studied with Rosina Lhévinne. She brought a Russian romanticism to his style, which was admirably suited to the repertoire of pieces that he favored.

Cliburn's talent garnered him numerous awards. He won the Dealey Award and the Kosciuszko Foundation's Chopin prize in 1952 and the Juilliard concerto competition the next year. In 1954 he won the Roeder Award and the Edgar M. Leventritt Foundation Award, the latter bringing him the opportunity to play with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. After graduating with honors later that year, Cliburn began touring as a solo performer.

The turning point in Cliburn's life came in 1958, when he won the International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition. His performance awed critics. Composer Aram Khachaturian declared Cliburn's rendition of Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto better than Rachmaninoff's.

The response of the American public to Cliburn's triumph was based at least as much on politics as on aesthetics. Having been beaten into space when the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957, Americans were eager for a victory of their own. Cliburn's success in Moscow gave them not only that but a classic American hero to boot. Tall, boyishly handsome, accomplished and charming yet modest, Cliburn was lionized by the press and embraced by the public.

Distrust between the superpowers was such that there were persistent rumors that Soviet officials had tried to pressure the judges to give the prize to a Russian, but that pianist Sviatoslav Richter had insisted that it go, deservedly, to Cliburn, and that Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev himself had ratified the decision.

Cliburn was given a ticker-tape parade in New York upon his return from the competition and appeared on television shows such as Person to Person, What's My Line? and The Tonight Show. His recording of Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto shared the top of the LP charts with Johnny Mathis's Greatest Hits album and the soundtrack from South Pacific. It became the first classical music album to sell a million copies within two years.

Cliburn was much in demand on the concert tour. He gave almost one hundred performances a year. His appearances in 1960 included a tour of the Soviet Union, where he was an audience favorite.

By the mid-1960s, however, the adulatory reviews for Cliburn were becoming mixed. Critics complained that he had not expanded his repertoire much beyond the works that had brought him the Tchaikovsky prize and showed little interest in doing so. Although Cliburn's repertoire was in fact wider than such comments suggested, it is true that the core of his program changed little over time.

By the beginning of the 1970s Cliburn's grueling concert schedule had taken a toll on him. His playing had become erratic, and critics continued to harp on his lack of musical growth. In 1974 Cliburn announced that after completing the concerts to which he was then committed, he would take a respite from the stage. After September 1978 he did not perform publicly until 1989, when he began accepting a limited number of concert dates.