NY Times – Music View: The Case of the Vanishing Pianist

Source https://www.nytimes.com/1978/03/05/archives/music-view-the-case-of-the-vanishing-pianist-music-view-nyiregyhazi.html
HAROLD C. SCHONBERG March 5, 1978

Ervin Nyiregyhazi was in town the other week. The last time around was in the 1920’s, when he was giving piano recitals in Aeolian Hall, long since gone, and making some critics wonder if Franz Liszt had been reincarnated. Today he seems be creating an equal kind of excitement.

In case you have been missing the stories, Mr. Nyiregyhazi [pronounced NEAR-edge-hahzee] is the 75-year-old Hungarian‐born pianist who recently has been making headlines .because of the bizarre circumstances of his life and rediscovery. He had been a prodigy— the most phenomenal since the young Josef Hofmann, many thought: It was discovered that he had perfect pitch at the age of 3. At 6 he played in public, including a concerto appearance with Artur Nikisch on the podium. He had the ability to memorize a piece after playing it through once or twice (he was a fabulous sight reader). When he came to New York in 1920, his playing turned the music world upside down. Some did not like it, but all agreed he was unique. No pianist had such a monumental sonority; no pianist dared take such slow tempos; no pianist had such ideas about musical organization.

His private life also was the subject of newspaper stories. What with his many marriages (nine, at last count), his arguments with concert management, his otherworldly behavior, his romantic appearance (slim, handsome, ethereal), he was constantly in the news. Suddenly he disappeared, and for years there was silence. Nyiregyhazi had flashed and burned out. Was he alive or dead? Nobody knew. Nobody cared.

• • •

About two years ago the International Piano Archives released a record entitled “Nyiregyhazi Plays Liszt.” There was a commotion in some critical circles. Here, the critics said, was the real 19th‐century romanticism. Forget about occasional wrong notes. Listen to the grandeur of the conception, the extraordinary surges of sound, the originality of the approach. Word spread like wildfire in a Los Angeles canyon. Nyiregyhazi, always the eccentric, was in the news again.

Turned out he had been living in a flophouse (in Los Angeles then, San Francisco now). He had not owned a piano for 30 years; had not even touched one. He had been penniless. He had been composing a good deal of music that he never expected—or even wanted—to be performed. Yet, for some reason, he allowed some friends, who had not forgotten him, talk him into giving a recital in a San Francisco church 1973. He walked in completely cold. He had not even looked the music—which he had last played about 50 years ago—much less practiced it. He just sat down and played.

An admirer taped the concert. The tape came into possession of Gregor Benko, head o&the International Piano Archives. Mr. Benko went wild, made a disk from the tape, and

`Ervin Nyiregyhazi’s playing is a kind of madness, but a divine madness.’ then talked the Ford Foundation into a two‐year subsidy for the venerable pianist. Part of this subsidy involves a record project. Richard Kapp of the Ford Foundation arranged for a studio in San Francisco, giving the pianist leeway to record anything he wanted. This May, Columbia Records will bring out three Nyiregyhazi disks.

Mr. Nyiregyhazi may be giving the cause of piano practice a permanent setback. A pianist can’t escape his five, six, seven hours a day at the keyboard. He simply can’t. But Mr. Nyiregyhazi apparently can.

“I never had to practice much,” he said the other week. He was in town trying out Baldwin pianos for his recording sessions in San Francisco. ‘’I could hear a piece and then knew it. My father was an opera singer, and I was playing all of his operas on the piano when I was 6 or 7. I never in my life practiced more than three hours a day. I never worried about hand position or anything like that. Everything came by itself. I think I always had a big sound. Around the age of 14, adolescence brought power. When I was 15 years old I substituted for Rachmaninoff in Christiana, in the Tchaikovsky concerto: When I played those first D‐flat chords, I myself was surprised, and the conductor almost fell off the podium. It was sensation.”

His teachers were Stefan Thoman and Arnold Szekely Budapest. In 1914 Mr. Nyiregyhazi finished his formal studies with Ernst von Dohnanyi in Berlin. They could not give him much in the way of technique. That he already had. “What they gave me was inspiration. Dohnanyi was a wonderful pianist and was full of ideas. Lamond showed me how Liszt played certain things. Lamond said that my tempos in the Liszt B minor Sonata were closer to Liszt’s than anybody.”

• • •

Mr. Nyireghazi cannot explain how he gets his effects. He is a quiet pianist, according to Mr. Kapp; his hands never are raised and there is no shoulder motion. Yet from those slim hands come the unparalleled sonorities. Mr. Nyiregyhazi’s hands are not those of most pianists. Only in sentimental novels do pianists have hands with long, tapering fingers. Your average pianist has a broad palm and spatulate fingers. Mr. Nyiregyhazi has a narrow palm and slender but not particularly long fingers. His thumb, however, is enormous, and there is a wide space between thumb and first finger. He can open to an easy tenth—C to E. His hands are those of young man, with no spots on the skin. On the whole, Mr. Nyiregyhazi looks much younger than his age; his face is unlined, he has a good crop of hair, he is tall and slender. These days he has to walk with a cane. Otherwise he could pass for 20 years younger.

He looks back on the wreck of his career with no particular sorrow or malice. When he came to the United States he had plenty of concerts, and his concerto appearances caused a furor. His performance of the Liszt A major with Pierre Monteux and the Boston Symphony is.legendary. But around 1924, he says, he had trouble with his manager, Robert Johnstone. Mr. Nyiregyhazi would find himself as an assisting artist on programs, sharing the evening with a singer or violinist. He complained. “That was enough to kill any reputation,” he says. “Audiences would think, ‘My God! He’s not a real star if he does not give solo concerts.’ So I made a lawsuit against Johnstone to break my contract.”

• • •

The court ruled against the pianist. After that manager would touch him. Mr. Nyiregyhazi was on the blacklist. He had a reputation as a troublemaker. “They say my marriages ruined my career,” Mr. Nyiregyhqzi says. “That is not true. After I lost the lawsuit I had to try to find other managers, and I was asked to ,make auditions. I, who had played with Nikisch and Monteux, to audition for silly ladies! I would not do it.”

Through the middle 1930’s he tried to make it on his own, playing scattered concerts here and abroad. Nothing seemed to work. Yet musicians who heard him found themselves the presence of a force of nature. Arnold Schoenberg first experienced Mr. Nyiregyhazi’s playing in 1935, in Los Angeles. He went home and immediately wrote a letter to the conductor Otto Klemperer. “I have never heard such a pianist before,” Schoenberg raved. “He does not play in the style you and I strive for . . . What he plays is expression, in the older sense of the word, nothing else. But such power of expression I have never heard before. You will disagree with his tempos just as much as I … but in his own way his music surprisingly regains its form, makes sense, establishes its own boundaries. The sound he brings out of the piano is unheard of.” Schoenberg went on to discuss Nyiregyhazi’s “incredible novelty and persuasiveness . . . astonishing technique … power of the will.”

Certainly Mr. Nyiregyhazi’s style is Romantic. But in his case some explanation is needed. His style is not representative of that of the pupils of Liszt and Leschetizky, nor has much in common with the Slavic pianism of Hofmann and Rachmaninoff. It is Romantic in that it is highly personal, that it takes liberties with the notes, in that it is free in its metrics, in that its dynamic scheme is outsized. Mr. Nyiregyhazi has no hesitation about reinforcing octaves, or actually changing the register of a passage (playing it an octave up down). He never changes a harmony, however, and looks with scorn at pianists who go in for cute effects. Once he heard Emil Sauer play Chopin’s “Butterfly” Etude and add a couple of chords at the end. He has never forgiven him.

But in reality his playing has very little in common with the playing of such high priests of Romanticism as Hofmann, Lhevinne, Friedman, Rachmaninoff, Gabrilowitsch or Rosenthal. Their playing had something in common, no matter how different their individual conceptions: They shared a culture, used pretty much the same tonal ideals, employed an aristocratic rubato, believed in the piano as a singing and not a percussive instrument. Mr. Nyiregyhazi heard them all, respected their impeccable workmanship, honored them as colleagues—but their playing really meant very little to him.

The only two pianists who influenced him were Paderewski and Busoni. “I heard Paderewski play the Liszt Second Rhapsody in 1923,” says Mr. Nyiregyhazi, “and it was overwhelming. Wrong notes, what did it matter? He made me change my ideas about the piece, and that is something that almost never happened to me.” As for Busoni, “He was the great musical thinker, the greatest Liszt player, a hypnotic artist.”

Neither Paderewski nor Busoni was afraid to make the kind of changes in the music that Mr. Nyyregyhazi does. “My approach is a combination of instinct and conscious morality. It is no sin to change a score, but you can’t do it in a frivolous way. An artist has to impose a sense of responsibility on the music. He must never violate the faith of the composer. That is a matter of artistic honor.”

His playing these days is sure to arouse controversy. His combination of slow tempos (so unlike the tempos of the great Romantic pianists), unorthodox repertory (Liszt symphonic poems in his own arrangement), occasional spatterings wrong notes, colossal fortissimos, alterations of the printed note, extreme individuality—all this is going to create yells outrage among the purists. For instance, he brings to some tiny Grieg pieces the same kind of intensity and dynamics he brings to the major Liszt works. The effect is like seeing butterfly the size of a blimp.

“Why not?” says the ,undisturbed Mr. Nyiregyhazi. feel the music to be very intense. It is small in size but very emotional and even tragic. There is tremendous drama those little pieces. They express heartbreak. So I take Grieg very seriously in spite of the small size of the pieces.”

If this is R manticism, it is not the kind represented the Romantics of the past. Probably the only pianist in history to play in Nyiregyhazi’s style would have been Anton Rubinstein, famous for his tremendous approach and also for his wrong notes. Today Mr. Nyiregyhazi’s playing is unique and has to be approached with no reference to any models. It is kind of madness, but a divine madness. He does not even think of himself as a pianist. “I am an artist of life, and I express myself at the piano. I have confidence in my own instincts and I don’t worry about the purists. At my age I don’t worry about anything at all. Take it or leave it. This is not arrogance. It is the way I feel.”