![]() ![]() Nyiregyhazi had composed by 3 and performed at Buckingham Palace and for other royals when he was 8, by which time he commanded a vast and complex repertory and could sight-read full symphonic scores with ease. Bazzana writes: “Determined never to be ruled, as his mother had ruled him, he sabotaged his personal life and career again and again.” He recalled years later that she even used to “massage” his penis. ![]() He was allowed neither to dress himself nor to cut his own food and into his teens, milking what remained of his marketability as a prodigy, she forced him to wear short pants and long hair. Narcissistic, smothering, she was “endlessly critical” of him. He was born in 1903 in Budapest to a philandering, passive father who died fairly young, and to an appalling stage mother eager to exploit his talent. He calls him “one of the greatest and most individual pianists of the 20th century” and “one of the most singular characters, with one of the most bizarre stories, in the history of music.” Kevin Bazzana, the author of an excellent, perceptive biography of another eccentric pianist, Glenn Gould, in this latest book fleshes out the details of Nyiregyhazi’s rise and fall, and rise and fall again. His story became a parable for the fickleness of art and life. In the 1970s, when he got a chance at another comeback, this time as a neglected Romantic, a throwback during an era of supposed automaton pianists, the methods of his rescuers and recording angels were perhaps less cynical, but the results were no less short-lived. One critic called the event “ludicrous.” Nyiregyhazi pocketed $75 and soon dropped back into obscurity. ![]() Those who had heard him years earlier recognized the sound. He made a thunderous racket at the keyboard. Several listeners in the audience at Wilshire Ebell Theater recognized the masked man when, nervous and embarrassed, he edged onto the stage. Once called “a new Liszt” and feted by royalty in Europe, now he was a temperamental, stage-frightened, oft-divorced alcoholic, given to aristocratic airs. Rumors would be spread about the mystery man: he was a world famous musician, a prisoner from San Quentin, an escaped mental patient. The pianist (this was Hollywood, remember) should wear a hangman’s hood and give a recital as Mr. He had once been famous, a child prodigy, but now he was down and out. The pianist, he learned, was in his 40s and living in a flophouse. Not long after World War II, a small-time impresario in Los Angeles named Irwin Parnes heard what he thought was a great pianist at a cocktail party of Hungarians. ![]()
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