In Waco on a fall afternoon in the late 1950s, a tall, slender 23-year-old with a thatch of blond hair and impossibly long fingers stepped onto the Baylor Bears football practice field. A newspaper photographer had him pose with two fellow East Texans, quarterback Buddy Humphrey and fullback Larry Hickman, both from Kilgore.

The third Kilgorite in the photograph on that long-ago afternoon was no budding wide receiver or signal-calling successor to Humphrey.

He was, in fact, the most famous pianist in the world at the time, the electrifying winner just a few months earlier of the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. A football field may have been just as foreign to Van Cliburn as Moscow during the Cold War, and yet the easy congeniality and the inclination not to take himself too seriously would become a Cliburn trademark.

Cliburn, who died Feb. 27 at his home in Fort Worth, certainly took his music seriously. The piano prodigy began taking lessons from his mother at age 3, won a statewide piano competition at 12 - the prize was a performance with the Houston Symphony - and astounded the world with his Moscow triumph in 1958.

The Russians idolized the tall Texan, and Cliburn felt an ardent affection for them, as well. Tim Page, writing in the Washington Post, recalled what Cliburn later said about the people he met on his first visit: "I was just so involved with the sweet and friendly people who were so passionate about music. They reminded me of Texans."

In May 1958, Time magazine put him on its cover with a banner that read "The Texan Who Conquered Russia." The only classical musician ever honored with a ticker-tape parade in New York, he was as famous as Elvis for a time.

Always, though, it was the music that was paramount, not himself, whether he was playing concerts (which he did sparingly after 1978) or helping pave the way for young musicians by lending his name to the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition.

Van Cliburn was 78 when he died. His devotion to music was as deep and unstinting as when he played for his mother back in Kilgore three-quarters of a century earlier.

"Music is enough for a lifetime," he often said, "but a lifetime is not enough for music."