The Hungarian-American pianist Ervin Nyíregyházi is one of the most fascinating and polarizing figures in musical history. Not many besides hardcore fans know his name today, but for a brief period in the 1920s and the 1970s, he was a sensation. Everything in between is one of the most fantastical life stories ever told.
I am a rotten son of a bitch pianist, but God does speak through me.
Ervin Nyíregyházi was born to a middle-class family in Budapest, on January 19th, 1903. From the age of two or three he displayed remarkable musical ability as a child, and was the subject of great interest and study from audiences and psychologists alike. He was the subject of a book called The psychology of a musical prodigy by pioneering psychologist Géza Révész, creating the foundation for professional study on the precocious. His mother refused to expose him to the normal world and kept him in a bubble where he was coddled by servants and forced to adhere to commercial tastes.
As a result, young Ervin was deprived of a normal childhood and suffered the infantilization and psychological abuse often inflicted on young prodigies. By the time had escaped his mother’s controlling grasps he was hardly a functioning adult—it was reported that he couldn’t even tie his own shoelaces or cut his own steak. Despite this, he found his way onto the world stage in 1920. His debut recital in New York City made him into an overnight sensation. However, his success was short-lived. His personal and financial sense of responsibility was nonexistent—he was naive, temperamental, easily exploitable, and once the industry figured this out, he became a pariah amongst managers and record companies.
Without a manager or any kind of stable contract, Nyíregyházi lived like a vagrant. After spending several years scraping by (sometimes even playing for prisons and gangsters to make ends meet), he moved to Los Angeles, where he found patchy work as a pianist and hand double for films—what little money he made in these erratic odd jobs was mostly spent on alcohol and prostitutes. In the span of the next few decades, he would concertize spasmodically, living the kind of a rogue’s life that would be fodder for the tabloid magazines. It is reported that he was married ten times; one wife attacked him with a knife, another was divorced after she coughed at one of his concerts, and yet another ended up deported into a sex ring. His escapades often seemed to blur the line of fantasy and reality, just as often as he blurred the line between sobriety and inebriety. The man who as a child had played in front of Queen Mary, Hungarian aristocracy, and famous actors could be found sleeping on park benches and subways. Without consistent access to a piano, his technical capabilities faltered; by the time he was brought back to the public stage in 1972, he must have been a shell of his former self.
“Rediscovered” by piano aficionados, he became a cult sensation of the 70s. Newspapers ate up his bizarre, itinerant, and tragic life story. Critics ate up his playing, which some deemed to be a forgotten link to Romanticism—but to others, it was “ridiculously amateurish”. Like almost all things in Nyíregyházi’s life, success wouldn’t last. He made a few recordings for the International Piano Archives, toured Japan, and then quietly returned to obscurity in California where he died of colon cancer in 1987.
The life and artistry of Ervin Nyíregyházi seems to defy all logic. Do the existing recordings of Ervin Nyíregyházi show signs of a “good” pianist by traditional definition? No. In fact, by most objective measures they displayed a bad pianist, who had not properly practiced in decades and showed little of the refined technique of his youth. At any given point in his recordings, Nyíregyházi played 50-70% of the notations written on the page, and almost none of the most basic of tempo and dynamic markings. But what he wasn’t, and was probably never physically capable of being, was mediocre.
Throughout his life, there was one thing consistent about the slender, lightly-built pianist—his ability to produce a monstrous, catastrophic, sound. At any hint of a melody, he would voice it to the heavens, and during climaxes produced a fortissimo that could bring down the heavens. Regardless of whether it was Brahms or Liszt, during climaxes the music lost all semblance of what was written on the score and would be replaced with an apocalyptic mass of notes (right or wrong, it didn’t matter) and a rolling thunder that could scarcely be said to come from a piano.
Such a sound could not be explained, but only experienced. Take a listen (headphone warning) to the introductory page of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No.3, à la Nyíregyházi:
Hardly a climactic point in the work, but already we are given a fractional taste of Nyíregyházi’s sonorific powers. Octave doublings and added lower octaves were tools in Nyíregyházi’s arsenal which he frequently deployed to create the impression that something behemothic was coming.
He could create full-bodied animal growls and prophetic terrors, such as in this Rachmaninov prelude:
Or he could create crystalline textures and floating sonorities, such as the barely audible right hand in the first movement of Scriabin’s 4th Sonata:
And when climaxes came, he was nothing less than a harbinger of doom.
Nyíregyházi certainly preferred to play “out” whenever possible, and even in passages marked piano he could etch out a laser sound that would fill even the largest of halls:
When he was given any dynamic marking that even hinted at “loud”, he took this as carte blanche to go all out—such as his opening to Dohnanyi’s First Rhapsody that seems to hearken Armageddon:
Besides his Cyclopean sound, Nyíregyházi was famous for his rhythmic stretches and distortions. He never failed to drag out a work so that it was at least 25% longer in duration than other pianists dared, utilizing something a reviewer once called the “slow motion effect.”
Listen to a traditional recording of a passage from Brahms’ Sonata No.3.
And then compare it with Nyíregyházi’s playing of the same passage:
Nyíregyházi takes the technique of dislocation (that is, the displacement of time between the left and right hands) to its furthest possible reaches. He stretches time until it is at its breaking point and cannot be stretched any further.
Some pianists try to imitate Horowitz. Few try to imitate Nyíregyházi, and I suspect many would injure themselves if they tried. Inimitable and largely unacceptable by society, Nyíregyházi remains one of a kind; the product of childhood psychological trauma juxtaposed with massive physical powers and an unfailing artistic and philosophical idealism that lent itself to the most unique and individualized piano performances of all time.
This was a man who had done it all. In his prime, he had met and played for Queen Mary, the Prince of Wales, Harry Houdini, Rudolph Valentino, Bela Lugosi, Ayn Rand, countless great conductors and composers, as well as slept on park benches, played for pennies in local prisons, and walked for miles because he could not afford a nickel for the subway. Without reserve, he tumbled through a life with fantastic ups and downs, which was the same way he played the piano. My readers will be divided on whether Nyíregyházi was a profound visionary, or a banging charlatan. But there can be no disagreement that Ervin Nyíregyházi was a fascinating man, a master of distortion and exaggeration.
And, as Horowitz famously pointed out, so were Michelangelo and El Greco.
Sources and further exploration:
Caleb Hu 
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