Lost Genius

Lost Genius, by Kevin Bazzana, is a biography of pianist Ervin Nyiregyházi.

Ever hear of him? Probably not.

You may know the names Vladimir Horowitz, Van Cliburn, and other pianistic titans of the 20th Century. But Nyiregyházi?

Whether Nyiregyházi even belongs in the class of pianistic titans is debatable. And it has been debated, ever since he re-emerged from decades of obscurity in the early 1970s. Lost Genius argues that yes, he does belong.

A lot was written about Nyiregyházi in the 1970s. A lot was written about him in the 1920s, too. In between? Mostly silence.

As a child prodigy born in Budapest, Nyiregyházi was compared favorably to Mozart. He seemed to master music effortlessly. He began composing his own stuff at four or five and played before heads of state and other dignitaries throughout Europe. A shrink wrote a book about him, and he was generally lauded as the Next Big Thing.

Nyiregyházi debuted at Carnegie Hall in 1920 when he was just seventeen. But he was difficult to work with and alienated the musical establishment, and it killed his career.

Or did it? “More plausibly, perhaps it was his unorthodox, limited, self-indulgent repertoire,” wrote a critic in 1979, in reviewing a Nyiregyházi album. Another reviewer dismissed him thusly: “For those wishing to explore skid row pianism, this album is recommended.” (The full meaning of this comment will shortly become clear.)

His style of playing turned a lot of people off. It has been described as “a free and intense ‘grand manner’ that goes back to the heyday of Romanticism as exemplified by Liszt himself – and that has come to be regarded with suspicion and/or derision in our antiseptic age.” Nyiregyházi put it this way: “The more gushing, the better.”

In any case, Nyiregyházi was basically washed up by his mid-twenties. But he liked the United States and stayed here, spending most of the next four decades living in a series of flophouses and other dumps in Los Angeles and San Francisco. He also married, divorced, married, divorced, philandered, drank heavily, married, divorced – and on and on.

Nyiregyházi re-emerged in the 1970s when a series of unplanned events thrust him back in the public eye. He recorded for several years (I have three of his albums) but never completely left his life of poverty behind him. By then in his seventies, he had his fifteen minutes of fame. Or maybe twenty minutes; he was big in Japan, for a while. But eventually he slid back into obscurity. He died, forgotten again, in 1987.

This is all described in detail, in Lost Genius. I recommend this book. The story is fascinating and the writing is fine. My biggest complaint with Lost Genius is its dearth of endnotes and other source material. In nonfiction I like to know where every last quote, every last assertion, comes from. This is how we test the veracity of any material. Some is there, but not nearly enough.

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BTW, that last name? Pronunciation is usually rendered NEAR-edge-hah-zee. There's a Wikipedia page on him, and a bunch of stuff on YouTube.

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NOTES

“More plausibly, perhaps it was... ” Carol Mont Parker, Clavier, January 1979.

“For those wishing to explore...” Unnamed reviewer, Clavier, January 1979.

“A free and intense...” from Stereo Review, January 1978.

“The more gushing...” from Time magazine, May 29, 1978.

Finally: Lost Genius: The Curious and Tragic Story of an Extraordinary Musical Prodigy was published in 2007 by Carroll and Graf. Later editions have a slightly different subtitle.

Final finally: According to a footnote on p. 229, Nyiregyházi “was intrigued by the Kennedy assassination, and composed several pieces about it. He was convinced Oswald was innocent and that Kennedy had been the victim of a right-wing conspiracy.” So intrigued, in fact, that he wrote an (apparently) unpublished Letter to the Editor of the Saturday Evening Post in 1967 in which he “outlined his theory.” I like Nyiregyházi even more now!