Blood on the Keys

Book reviewed: Lost Genius by Kevin Bazzana

He was said to be a new Liszt. Music lovers flocked to his concerts. Critics wrote gushing reviews. Aristocrats and assorted royalty opened the doors of their salons to hear him play. Puccini and Lehár sang his praises. A psychologist made him the subject of a book. He was the ultimate child prodigy who, according to Ernst von Dohnányi, could do anything at the keyboard. Then everything went wrong. Glory is sad, Napoleon supposedly remarked; it is certainly fleeting. By the age of thirty, the “new Liszt” was living on skid row, all but forgotten. At the end of his life, he was miraculously rediscovered, only to be dispatched back to oblivion. Today, some forty years after his death, only hardcore piano mavens might know who he was. The Canadian music historian Kevin Bazzana, who has made a career out of writing about eccentric pianists, attempted to redress the situation with his 2007 book Lost Genius. Recently I stumbled upon a used copy of the book and, the name of Ervin Nyiregyházi all but unfamiliar to me, I promptly resolved to fill the lacuna and see what I, along with the rest of the world, had missed.

Ervin Nyiregyházi (pronounced, Bazzana tells us, as “Nyeer-edge-hah-zee”) was born in 1903, a bumper-crop year that gave the world Claudio Arrau, Vladimir Horowitz, Rudolf Serkin . . . and Nyiregyházi. Part of Budapest’s educated middle class, his parents were assimilated Jews, a fact Nyiregyházi would conceal for most of his life. His astounding gifts were manifested early on. At the age of four, Nyiregyházi had already composed his own pieces for piano and was taken to the National Hungarian Royal Academy of Music to perform them before two professors. He developed absolute pitch and the ability to sight-read, sometimes perfectly, and at six gave his first public concert. At age eight, he played before Queen Mary at Buckingham Palace. Two years later, he entertained an admiring audience at a Berlin music salon; Engelbert Humperdinck and Richard Strauss were among the guests. Dohnányi offered to tutor Nyiregyházi for free. Europe’s leading orchestras welcomed him with open arms; Nyiregyházi performed a Liszt concerto alongside the Berlin Philharmonic, under the baton of Arthur Nikisch no less, and when Rachmaninoff pulled out of an Oslo concert at the eleventh hour, the fifteen-year-old Nyiregyházi was summoned to Norway to step in as a substitute, with the king and queen in attendance. In Copenhagen, Grieg’s widow took the boy out for drinks and said he played Grieg exactly as her late husband would have wanted it. Nyiregyházi had even appeared in literature. Convinced he was dealing with a child prodigy on the order of Mozart, the psychologist Géza Révész had spent four years studying Nyiregyházi and eventually published a text that is still cited.

Brilliance is never cost-free. An extant photo of the eight-year-old Nyiregyházi outside the Buckingham Palace just before his famous concert shows an eerily pallid kid decked out like Little Lord Fauntleroy, and the image makes one uneasy. The line between talent cultivation and talent exploitation is a fine one; Nyiregyházi’s socially ambitious and class-conscious parents — his domineering mother especially — did not distinguish between the two, using their wunderkind as an entry ticket into Budapest’s finer homes. The hothouse in which they had placed Nyiregyházi exacerbated his pathological helplessness, and he would struggle with buttons and shoelaces even as an adult. Possibly there were darker overtones. Bazzana speculates that Nyiregyházi might have been sexually abused by his mother: after the death of Nyiregyházi’s father in 1914, she took to massaging her son’s penis. While the exact nature of this is unclear, there is no doubt Nyiregyházi hated her; decades later, an intoxicated Nyiregyházi was heard to praise Hitler because he had finished off his mother during the Holocaust. While much must remain conjectural, the deformed personality so pronounced in his mature years can confidently be traced to his childhood.

His move to the US in 1920 was a turning point. Nyiregyházi disembarked on Ellis Island with great expectations, and he got off to a promising start, giving a recital at Carnegie Hall days after his arrival. But gradually his fortunes began to change. Part of it was sheer bad luck — sometimes the planets were just not aligned, as they didn’t seem to be for much of Nyiregyházi’s life. Part of it was his psychological makeup. Nyiregyházi was hypersensitive, difficult, and high-maintenance, with a tendency to bite any hand that fed him. He eschewed all compromises; balking at what he considered to be American philistinism, he insisted on playing what he wanted the way he wanted. As the managers withdrew, his career stalled, and interest in Nyiregyházi waned. By the late 1920s, he was indigent — “the Count of No-Account,” in his own words — and living in flophouses, reduced to the indignity of playing popular music in vaudeville and in hotel orchestras. The long descent had begun, and the pianist who had performed for European monarchs would spend the next half a century like a character from a Henry Miller novel, sleeping with dozens of women (and, occasionally, men), marrying ten of them, and drinking away his liver. When American philistinism or the latest marriage proved to be too much, he escaped to Europe, where no one remembered him. While Nyiregyházi continued to compose music, and also play it in people’s homes, at various social events, and in a few Hollywood B movies, his talent was running to nothing. Every so often, a sympathetic soul blown away by Nyiregyházi’s virtuosity would try and help resuscitate his career; nothing ever came of it. Either the circumstances were not propitious, or Nyiregyházi botched things up.

Nyiregyházi’s professional hibernation came to an end in the early 1970s, more than fifty years since his Carnegie Hall debut. By a stroke of luck, someone in the music industry tracked him down, asked him to play, and a star was reborn. Recitals and recordings followed, along with media attention. Nyiregyházi was famous again, but not necessarily for the reasons that he wanted. Part of his resurrection owed itself to the fascination people felt for his story and not his art. Nyiregyházi was the “skidrow pianist,” the “Franz Liszt of the Tenderloin,” the “pianist who came in from the cold.” Allergic to celebrity culture, Nyiregyházi was rankled by the monikers and the crass commercialization of his name. Yet Nyiregyházi’s worst enemy was not American philistinism but Nyiregyházi. He still lived in urban underbellies, where accommodations were cheap and prostitutes close at hand. Invited one day to a studio to make a recording, Nyiregyházi showed up intoxicated and in a state of considerable agitation — a hooker had just dangled him outside the window of his flophouse because he hadn’t paid her for her services. Cantankerous, increasingly paranoid, and disgusted by the commercial exploitation of his art, Nyiregyházi was now even more difficult to deal with. He routinely turned on his friends and benefactors, and sabotaged every opportunity that came his way. Things were about to end the way they had always had.

By 1980, just as it appeared the brouhaha had run its course, the gods smiled upon Nyiregyházi one last time. Two Japanese musicians besotted with Nyiregyházi traveled to the US to prevail upon the pianist, now pushing eighty, to give a series of concerts in Japan. Nyiregyházi obliged and went on to experience a most unlikely coda to his strange career. His rogue individualism and defiant anti-establishment stance resonated with the Japanese. People turned up to hear Nyiregyházi play, his concerts made money, and the local press praised him to the skies. He became a national sensation. Celebrated, feted, and lavished with gifts, he made a second trip to Japan in 1982, and there was even talk of his relocating to Japan and working as a college professor. But it never panned out. The Nyiregyházi legend had little staying power, anywhere, and Japanese interest in Nyiregyházi eventually fizzled out. In the Land of the Rising Sun, the sun finally set. Five years later, in 1987, Nyiregyházi succumbed to colon carcinoma. Aside from his tenth wife and a few other people, no one came to the funeral, held in California, to pay their last respects. His estate was valued at a pitiable $2,000; by comparison, Horowitz’s, when he died a few years later, was estimated at $6–8 million. For the second Liszt, this was a terrible denouement.

A sympathetic biographer, Bazzana suggests that Nyiregyházi was a misunderstood genius whose time may yet to come. The burden of proof is on Bazzana. As a pianist, Nyiregyházi was controversial and polarizing. Bazzana himself concedes there were problems. Nyiregyházi’s playing lacked levity; instead, he went for a “Wagnerian heaviness, deliberation, mass.” For violence, one might add — a representative from Steinway & Sons refused Nyiregyházi service out of fear that he would damage the instrument. Those who saw Nyiregyházi perform reported he left blood on the keys, and it is tempting to imagine the piano as Nyiregyházi’s Balzacian peau de chagrin, subtracting from his life every time he sat down to play it. A nice image, but that’s all it is. Wagnerian heaviness aside, Nyiregyházi was willing to be unfaithful to the scores of works to suit his own temperament and ideas. He claimed that other pianists played the right notes the wrong way, while he played the wrong ones the right way. Bazzana agrees. Others did not. Rachmaninoff, who attended all three of Nyiregyházi’s Carnegie Hall recitals, did not know what to think of what he had heard; he found Nyiregyházi interesting but problematic. Otto Klemperer, who had been talked into hearing Nyiregyházi play by Arnold Schoenberg, left the audition convinced that Nyiregyházi was not a “sincere” musician. When Nyiregyházi was catapulted back into fame in the 1970s, Earl Wild dismissed his music as “the biggest piece of baloney”; Vladimir Ashkenazy called Nyiregyházi a manufactured sensation and a joke. The music critic Samuel Lipman wrote that Nyiregyházi’s playing “represented a throwback to a now dead tradition of mindless pianistic display before mindless audiences.” In Japan, another notable music critic walked out of one of Nyiregyházi’s concerts, while a Japanese composer concluded Nyiregyházi was insane.

Sadly, anyone who wants to go beyond received opinions will be hampered by the absence of works performed by Nyiregyházi while still in his prime. We can only judge him on the strength of pieces that he played in his late years, when he was no longer in top form. There isn’t that much to go by, either. Recordings are strewn haphazardly about Youtube; streaming services only seem to offer a single complete Nyiregyházi album. Having listened to a handful of works — those with which I have some familiarity — I am inclined to side with the detractors. Performing Scriabin’s Piano Sonata №4, Nyiregyházi acquits himself well in the first movement but makes a mess of the exuberant second, storming through it like a raging bull in a room full of porcelain bibelots. There is none of the Scriabinesque finesse that you find in Vladimir Sofronitsky’s interpretation of the piece or, better yet, Mikhail Pletnev’s 1997 recording on Erato. Debussy — Estampes №2 (Pagodes) and La plus que lente — suffers less at Nyiregyházi’s hands, but both pieces have been done better by others. His overly long Pagodes (more than six minutes in length) has elements of grandeur yet feels watery and belabored, and one yearns for the crispness of Samson François and Ivan Moravec. Nyiregyházi’s La plus que lente is not without charm, but it lacks the enchanting effortlessness that you find in Arthur Rubinstein’s interpretation or the pluckiness in the one by Walter Gieseking. There are moments of beauty in Nyiregyházi’s playing; without question, something is being communicated. Whether that something is Debussy, is open to debate.

To be sure, Nyiregyházi was more of a Liszt guy, but no one who has heard Sviatoslav Richter or Jerome Rose play Liszt’s Mephisto Waltzes №1 and №2 will be able to listen to Nyiregyházi’s recordings of the work, available on Youtube at the time of writing, without wincing. His Waltz №1 is slipshod and awful right from the opening bars, while the second one is quickly transformed into a full-blown assault on the piano that will make your ears bleed. Taking a longer, meatier piece as an example, Nyiregyházi’s rendition of Brahms’s Piano Sonata №3, nearly forty-seven minutes long, is a far cry from the polished, no-nonsense performances by Julius Katchen or André Laplante. “Slower,” of course, need not be “worse.” Anatol Ugorski’s recording of the sonata on Deutsche Grammophon is comparable in length but, though characteristically idiosyncratic and indulgent, Ugorski plays the piece with a fine filigree that reels you in. By contrast, Nyiregyházi’s interpretation is jarringly tempestuous and, at times, sloppy. There is a lot of hammering away at the piano, and while one comes across moments of undeniable pulchritude — notably in the second movement — this makes for intolerable listening overall. One can’t help but think that, in the end, Nyiregyházi’s art mirrored his shambolic life.

In Lost Genius, Bazzana seeks to do justice to both. The result is a well-written book, if lacking in flavor and occasionally suffering from the author’s detours through armchair psychology (attention, biographers: sometimes a cigar is just a cigar). Bazzana’s portrait of Nyiregyházi is a moving one, and the reader ends up feeling sorry for this man, who was dissolute and damaged but not malignant. Photos of Nyiregyházi in his later years show more than just a handsome, elegant Mitteleuropean with a droopy face; they reveal someone who sought to maintain an aristocracy of the spirit. In that sense, Nyiregyházi’s life can be called a success. Bazzana argues that someone like Nyiregyházi should not be judged by conventional standards of achievement. There are brilliant artists who are psychologically too complex to forge a career commensurate with their gifts. Any kind of compromise — whether it is being more prolific or less neurotic — will be at the expense of their art. Confronted by the demands of a world that expects compromises, they end up checking out and going their own way. Their failure, insofar as one can speak of one, can only be measured by the distance between their talent and reputation. To the extent that they remain faithful to their own standards of artistic excellence, they cannot be considered as failures, only history’s lost geniuses. But history is fluid, and the distance between an artist’s talent and reputation is not immutable or static. Times change; both talent and reputations are continuously reappraised. Pace the title of his book, Bazzana writes that Nyiregyházi “was a genius not quite wholly lost, and we have perhaps not yet reached the end of his story.” Perhaps, the reader might think, not quite convinced.