Born in 1903, the Hungarian pianist Ervin Nyíregyházi conformed in many ways to the standard image of a child prodigy. He was the subject of a 1916 book entitled The Psychology of a Musical Prodigy and has now found, in Kevin Bazzana, a conventional biographer.
Nyíregyházi (pronounced, we are told, “nyeer-edge-hah-zee”) died in 1987 in Los Angeles. Between his Budapest beginnings and his end in America lies one of the strangest trajectories in modern musical history. As a child in Hungary he studied with Ernst von Dohnányi, won the praise of visiting celebrities such as Puccini and Franz Lehár, and was dragged around Europe and England by his mother (the dominant parent). Aristocratic patrons fawned over him, inducing the erroneous belief that he was one of them, a delusion that persisted through an adult life spent largely in skidrow apartments.
At the age of twelve, while performing in Berlin, he underwent a “conversion” to the music of his countryman Franz Liszt. Though of course aware of Liszt, he had been brought up in a musical environment that gave primacy to “absolute music,” meaning the largely non-programmatic compositions of Beethoven, Brahms, and other German masters. The extra-musical subject matter of Liszt’s music, with its gestures towards the Swiss Alps, medieval legends, and great works of literature, was to him “like discovering a new world.” This led to a convoluted state of affairs in which his worship of Liszt, Hungary’s greatest composer, put him at odds with
