Nine Wives and 700 Works Later

By Annalyn Swan

Nyiregyhazi returns from out of the past

The miracle took place five years ago in San Francisco's Old First Presbyterian Church. A destitute old man with trembling hands sat down at the Baldwin piano to give a fund-raising recital for his sick wife's medical expenses. He had not practiced, or owned a piano, for four decades. He had not even looked at the music, Liszt's lengthy, difficult Legendes, in more than half a century. Yet when his ringers touched the keys, there came a burst of musical thunder, exploding octaves and a bass of such power and sonority that the Baldwin threatened to shake apart.

A piano aficionado connected with the International Piano Archives of the University of Maryland happened to pass by the church with a cassette recorder just before the recital. He went in, heard the beginnings of the astonishing performance--the sort of huge sound that Anton Rubinstein reputedly possessed --and taped it. The discovery was akin to some great archaeological find. The pianist was Ervin Nyiregyhazi (pronounced near-edge-hah-zee), a Hungarian-born prodigy who made his debut at six, toured Europe as a Wunderkind and conquered Carnegie Hall in 1920, at 17. Then, following a string of public and private disasters, including the first of nine marriages, he vanished from public view.

His rediscovery, one of the most bizarre comebacks in music history, has been as rapid as was his fall half a century earlier. The tapes of that church concert, along with a few Liszt pieces recorded under studio conditions, have been released as a Nyiregyhazi Plays Liszt (IPA/Desmar) record. Critics exclaimed over the strange, powerful playing. In two further sets of taping sessions, underwritten by the Ford Foundation, Nyiregyhazi played Liszt and other romantics; record release is now being negotiated. Meanwhile, NBC will be featuring Nyiregyhazi on its June 3 Weekend show. He emerges as an inspired throwback to a more heroic past. Says Nyiregyhazi: "Pianists today are so lacking in expressiveness that I don't feel very much when I hear them play."

Today, at 75, he is straight-backed and energetic, with a courtly manner and ornate English. He does not live the life of a new celebrity, instead subsisting mostly on Social Security in a transient hotel in San Francisco's notorious Tenderloin district. Since his last wife died in 1974, Nyiregyhazi has been a virtual recluse. A hard drinker and heavy thinker (Shakespeare and Schiller are familiars), he is as profligate with money as with matrimony. "Of course financial trouble is never welcome," he says. "But I never regarded concertizing as a glorious occupation. I always preferred music as a way of life, not as a profession."

Despite his poverty, he likes class.

When he does venture out, he wears his one navy-blue suit. Often he walks to the elegant St. Francis Hotel, where he likes to sit in the ornate palm court and drink Scotch. "Whenever I had $10," he says, "I'd blow it on an expensive lunch."

He was born in Budapest. His father was a tenor in the Royal Hungarian Opera chorus, and his mother an amateur pianist. At three, Nyiregyhazi could reproduce on a toy piano the melodies that his father sang. At four, he began piano lessons and composing. His first piece, he recalls, was "sort of Japanese--my father had been singing Madama Butterfly--and in the key of A-minor."

Nyiregyhazi's memory seemed infallible, and his slender, tapered fingers seemed to master compositions effortlessly. After playing a piece two or three times, he would have it memorized. (He still has more than a thousand works, including his transcriptions of symphony movements and arias, at his fingertips.) Nyiregyhazi proved so extraordinary a child prodigy that the Psychological Laboratory in Amsterdam began a four-year study of him when he was seven. It found that his precocity was similar to that of the child Mozart. At eight, he read all of Shakespeare in German translation; at ten came Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.

Spurred on by his ambitious mother, Nyiregyhazi became a performer. He made his orchestral debut with the Berlin Philharmonic at the age of twelve, playing Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto, then completed a string of European tours over the next five years. Along the way, he happened upon the work of Liszt, then out of fashion. The great romantic, perhaps the most dramatic pianist of all time, became Nyiregyhazi's mentor and model. "It was like discovering a new world," he says. "Such lyrical and dramatic intensity, such emphasis on the grandiose and imperial."

His discovery of the real New World came soon after, with a triumphant debut at Carnegie Hall in 1920. He liked the praise, the skyscrapers, a certain "bravado and toughness" about Americans. He decided to stay. Almost immediately, his misfortunes began. Critics had second thoughts. He lost a legal wrangle with his manager over fees, and was blacklisted by the musical fraternity. Then his marriage -- in 1926 to a woman eleven years older, who had promised to re-establish his career -- blew up.

Nyiregyhazi drifted to Hollywood, where for two years he sight-read orchestral scores submitted to United Artists as music for movies. It was a feat few pianists could equal, since it involved reading ten or so musical lines simultaneously.

Says Nyiregyhazi, "It was just like reading a book." He became friends with sev eral stars, among them Gloria Swanson.

After that he gave a few recitals and kept getting married and divorced. Nothing seemed to last. He drifted farther from sight and finally vanished. Until now.

Nyiregyhazi's record and tapes fascinate: in an age of precision playing, they are passionate. His slow tempos, like Liszt's, are funereal; each note seems weighted. He repeats at will sections that he finds lyrical. When he is loud, he is very, very loud, and often the great rushes of sound are overpedaled into a blur.

Wrong notes intrude; unlike almost all modern artists, he neither practiced be fore the sessions ("Practicing is tedious anathema to me") nor redubbed passages to smooth out errors. In a final heresy, he embraces sentimentality, the witch word of the 20th century. "The more gushing, the better," he proclaims.

The effect is wild and extravagant.

At his best -- as in Liszt's Ballade in B-Minor, on the IPA/Desmar record -- the massive rumbling bass is an effective counterpoint to the ethereal run-work in the treble. It is an inspired interpretation; method and material work in harmony.

Nyiregyhazi refuses to ride the new wave of publicity. He rules out concert appearances. Always a nervous performer, he is now terrified by audiences and can only play when in a sort of in spired trance. He fears criticism, to the point that he records only less-known romantic works and his own transcriptions of symphonic and operatic works. "Musicians have always disapproved of my style as too emotional, too idiosyncratic," he says. "So now I prefer to record works where no one can compare me to anyone else. I want to do only what I want to do."

What he most wants to do is spend his days composing. Since childhood, he has written more than 700 works. None of his adult compositions has been heard ("I have had enough criticism as a performer," he says). But like Liszt, he writes for the piano as if it were an orchestra, aiming for as much drama and depth as possible. One work, A Picture of Dorian Gray (he admires Oscar Wilde's "razor-like mind"), is more than two hours long. As for what might have been, he says quietly, "I would have done the same so-called mistakes." Then he smiles. "And there have been great moments."

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