Word: nyiregyh
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Dates: during 1978-1978
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...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 Nyiregyházi (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...
...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 Nyiregyházi Plays Liszt (IPA/Desmar) record. Critics exclaimed over the strange, powerful playing. In two further sets of taping sessions, underwritten by the Ford Foundation, Nyiregyházi played Liszt and other romantics; record release is now being negotiated. Meanwhile, NBC will be featuring Nyiregyházi on its June 3 Weekend show. He emerges...
...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, Nyiregyházi 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...
...born in Budapest. His father was a tenor in the Royal Hungarian Opera chorus, and his mother an amateur pianist. At three, Nyiregyházi 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...
...Nyiregyházi'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.) Nyiregyházi 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...