NY Times – After 50 Years and 9 Wives, Erwin Nyiregyhazi Is Back at the Piano

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1978/02/13/archives/after-50-years-and-9-wives-erwin-nyiregyhazi-is-back-at-the-piano.html
Harold C. Schonberg, Feb. 13, 1978

ONCE ACCLAIMED a major pianist, but, absent from the scene for almost, 50 years, living in obscurity for most of those years in a Los Angeles slum, totally away from the keyboard, he has suddenly started playing again. His recording sessions in San Francisco are, beginning to rock the world of music. His name is Erwin Nyiregyhazi, and his case may be unique in pianistic history.

Erwin who?

In the 1920’s it would not have been necessary to ask the question. Erwin Nyiregyhazi was a headliner, as much for his pianistic genius as for his private life. Considered the greatest prodigy since Josef Hofmann, he had been playing in public since the age of six. He was also getting into trouble with his wives’ (at last count he has had nine), with his fiancées, with his agents, with his career. Newspapers gleefully followed up the latest Nyiregyhazi caper. He seemed incapable of living any kind of normal life.

But musicians took him seriously. His ‘Playing was like nobody else’s. He orchestrated at the piano, with tremendous surges of tone and color. His tempos, his conception, his free attitude toward the printed note, his Romantic musical mannerisms—all these set him apart. Qualified observers did not know exactly what to make of him, but they knew he was something special. Arnold Schoenberg, for one, was bowled over. “Such power of expression I have never heard before,” he wrote to the conductor Otto Klemperer. And then follows three pages of Schoenberg’s analysis of Nyiregyhazi’s “incredible” playing.

He was giving concerts throughout the 20’s. Then he played less and less, giving up the piano in the middle 30’s. He disappeared, and to all effects and purposes became a recluse, living in a single room in a Los Angeles slum, not even owning a piano, much less playing one. But if he did not play, he could compose. By now he has over 700 works in manuscript. He has never played them in public, nor will he allow them to be heard.

Some admirers on the West Coast, who had not forgotten him, talked him, into giving a concert in San Francisco in 1973. On his program at the Old First Church were the two “St. Francis Legends” by Liszt, both of enormous length and difficulty.. Mr. Nylregyhazi simply walked out and played them. He had not practiced. He had not even looked at the music for a half‐century.

A music lover in the audience made a tape of the concert, and it came into the possession of Gregor Benko. Mr. Benko, a specialist in piano playing of the Romantic period, listened and all but wept. Here was the 19th century come back to,life. He got in touch with Mr. Nyiregyhazi and arranged for a recording session. The disk was on the market soon after, and some critics dropped everything to write about this new and strange, but overwhelming, piano playing. Those sonorities, they said, made Vladimir Horowitz look pale.

Then the Ford Foundation decided to help out. Mr. Benko approached Richard Kapp, the program officer in the foundation’s Office of the Arts. An arrangement was made in which the pianist will receive a stipend for two years. He had been penniless. He also was given leeway to record whatever he desired. Columbia Records became interested, and ,in May will release three Nyiregyhazi disks, the fruits of the current sessions. Mr. Nyiregyhazi had never before made any records. In the early 20’s he had made a few piano rolls for Ampico, but those, he says, were no good.

All pianists are compulsive about practicing. They do five, six, seven hours, day in and day out. Here comes Mr. Nyiregyhazi, who had not touched a piano, in decades. How does he manage?

“I never practiced much after I was a young child,” he said yesterday on the telephone from San Francisco. ,“I always memorized easily. That was, enough. Practice is no good. If I feel well while playing, it will come out well. If not, it won’t.” He has total recall, and a photographic memory. He also has tactile memory. The fingers respond on their own when they strike the keys.

Mr. Nyiregyhazi seems to have evolved his own style. The only pianists of the past who meant much to him were Ignaz Paderewski and Ferruccio Busoni. But, he says, he first heard. Paderewski in 1922, at which time his own style was fully formed. Paderewski’s tonal ideal, Mr. Nyiregyhazi thinks, corresponded to his. As for Busoni, there was a monumentality to his playing that ho pianist ever matched.

•

Probably the only pianist’ of the past who played as Mr. Nyiregyhazi does was Anton Rubinstein, who died in 1894 and was considered Liszt’s only real rival. From all reports, Rubinstein’s playing had colossal sonorities, and he did not worry about wrong notes here and there.

“I love melody and harmony,” Mr. Nyiregyhazi said. “When I love something, I have no hesitation repeating it, as in the Liszt rhapsody.” Mr. Nyiregyhazi was referring to his new performance of the Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody No. 3, in which he takes repeats not indicated in the music. He also takes a very slow tempo, all kinds of rhythmic shifts, plays left hand before right (a derided Romantic mannerism) and constructs something entirely grand, original and fascinating. Pianists who hear this are going to have to rethink their conception of the Liszt rhapsodies. Purists, on the other hand, may hate it.

“I play consciously and subconsciously,” Mr. Nyireghyhazi said, “I have no theories about technique and I don’t know where the source comes from. I will not play any music not close to me emotionally. I will not play anything twice the same way: I will not play concertos at the present time. I used to play most concertos, but that was a long time ago. All I want to do is play a different kind of music. Perhaps I will come to New York, but not to give concerts.. Making records is just about the limit for me.”

Mr. Kapp, however, said yesterday that there had been discussions of concerto recordings, and even- the possibility of a ‘New York performance. Perhaps he can get Mr. Nyiregyhazi to Germany for a concerto session. Mr. Kapp is a conductor and he would be on the podium for the works‐that have been discussed—the two Brahms concertos, the Busoni, the Liszt A major, “Totentanz” and “Malediction,” and, of all things, the Piano’ Concerto by Sergei Bortkievich, a ‘minor, Russian composer. Mr. Nyiregyhazi loves the work.

“I know he says he won’t make concerto recordings. But he has been known to change his mind,” said Mr. Kapp, hopefully.