Lost Genius: The Curious and Tragic Story of an Extraordinary Musical Prodigy [Hardcover]

Kevin Bazzana (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 28, 2007

Born in Budapest in 1903, Ervin Nyiregyházi (nyeer-edge-hah-zee) was composing at two, giving his first public recital at six, and performing all over Europe by eight. He was soon recognized as one of the most remarkable child prodigies in history and became the subject of a four-year study by a psychologist. By twenty-five, he had all but disappeared. Mismanaged, exploited, and insistent on an intensely Romantic style, his career foundered in adulthood and he was reduced to penury. In 1928, he settled in Los Angeles, where he performed sporadically and worked in Hollywood. Psychologically, he remained a child, and found the ordinary demands of daily life onerous — he struggled even to dress himself. He drank heavily, was insatiable sexually (he married ten times), and lived in abject poverty, yet such was his talent and charisma that he numbered among his friends and champions Rudolph Valentino, Harry Houdini, Theodore Dreiser, Bela Lugosi, and Gloria Swanson. Rediscovered in the 1970s, he enjoyed a sensational and controversial renaissance. Kevin Bazzana explores the brilliant but troubled mind of a geniune Romantic adrift in the modern age. The story he tells is one of the most fascinating - and bizarre - in the history of music.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Ervin Nyiregyházi (1903–1987) dazzled concert audiences in the early 20th century with his volcanic performances, playing so intensely that his fingers bled on the keys. Alas, his keyboard virtuosity was drowned out by a discordant symphony of neuroses. Unable even to tie his shoes properly, Nyiregyházi, who was born in Budapest, Hungary, and settled in L.A., wrestled with crippling stage fright; drank and womanized compulsively (his seventh wife was a prostitute he met six days before marrying her in Vegas); exhausted others with his neediness, paranoia and grandiose posturing; and sabotaged a potentially brilliant career in the name of artistic purity. Bazzana, biographer of eccentric pianist Glenn Gould, follows Nyiregyházi's life from early acclaim through decades of poverty, obscurity and debauchery to his brief, celebrated comeback in the 1970s as the skid row pianist. Although Bazzana can be reductionist—he diagnoses Nyiregyházi with borderline personality disorder brought on by a domineering stage mother—he tells this lurid story sympathetically, without excusing Nyiregyházi's excesses. Even better, he writes about his subject's music in a lucid and evocative way. A tormented, self-destructive artist and the creator of thrilling, emotionally supercharged music, Nyiregyházi is, in Bazzana's compelling portrait, a study in the upside and downside of romanticism. Photos. (Sept. 17)
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From The New Yorker

Bazzana, the author of an incisive study of Glenn Gould, follows up with the extraordinary story of a pianist much less famous but even more eccentric, Ervin Nyiregyházi. Born in Budapest in 1903, he was a prodigy whose early life was a series of effortless triumphs. But, after he moved to America, his career quickly foundered, thanks to unscrupulous managers and his own immense stubbornness. He slept rough in New York and, later, lived in seedy hotels in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Nyiregyházi, who called himself "a fortissimo bastard" and claimed to be "addicted to Liszt, oral sex, and alcohol," married ten times and had countless other conquests (including, probably, Gloria Swanson). Rediscovered late in life, he made recordings that are controversial: his interpretations were distinctive but his technique was shaky. Bazzana painstakingly re-creates a life lived mostly in obscurity and judiciously separates greatness from vainglory. The result is a balanced portrait that also often reads like a parable about the artistic temperament.
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Da Capo Press; First Edition edition (September 28, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786720883
• ISBN-13: 978-0786720880
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #353,265 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Undoing of a Genius, December 24, 2007

By 

Hank Drake (Cleveland, OH United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Lost Genius: The Curious and Tragic Story of an Extraordinary Musical Prodigy (Hardcover)

In 1924, Geza Revesh published The Psychology of a Musical Prodigy, a scholarly study which focused on Ervin Nyiregyhazi's childhood and early gifts. Over 80 years later, Revesh's book remains a reference work. But what happened to the subject of that book?

Kevin Bazzana's book is the first to document the rest of Nyiregyhazi's life in detail, from his spectacular 1920 Carnegie Hall debut, to his early flameout a few years later, and his bizarre resurrection in the 1970s.

During the middle period of his life, previously undocumented, Nyiregyhazi relentlessly indulged dual addictions for alcohol and sex. Aside from composing doggedly old fashioned works with silly titles, Nyiregyhazi's activity in the musical community ground to a halt. He did not practice, nor did he even own a piano. The last was understandable because he did not have a stable residence. Bazzana has chronicled these winter years (roughly 1925-1972, although the pianist did some rewarding work with the WPA in the 1930s) in great detail. Nyiregyhazi married ten times. Although Bazzana mentions all his wives, it's not easy keeping the chronology in sequence because Bazzana goes back and forth between time periods. Perhaps a chart would have been helpful!

While much been has made of Nyiregyhazi's treatment by the music industry (in 1925, he was compelled to sue his manager), it becomes apparent reading Bazzana's book that the main reason for the collapse of Nyiregyhazi's career was the pianist himself. He was loathe to play standard repertoire, especially in later years, because he feared comparison with other pianists. The fact that he refused to practice, even when provided with a piano, did not help his playing.

Bazzana does not pretend to be objective. He believes that Nyiregyhazi belongs in the pantheon of great pianists, and complains that the Hungarian, also a "great pianist," was not afforded the 1903 centennial celebration that was given to Claudio Arrau, Vladimir Horowitz, and Rudolf Serkin. Bazzana seems to be particularly obsessed with Horowitz, taking trouble to note that Nyiregyhazi was "not very much impressed" with his Russian contemporary and seeming perturbed that Nyiregyhazi perished with a mere $2,000 to his name while Horowitz's estate was valued at between $6 and $8 million. Horowitz's opinion of Nyiregyhazi is unknown. Other musicians' opinions of Nyiregyhazi ranged from to "pure expression" (Arnold Schoenberg), to "an amateur" (Vladimir Ashkenazy) and "the biggest piece of baloney" (Earl Wild). Nyiregyhazi seldom garnered a neutral response, and Bazzana can be forgiven the occasional hyperbole in his recounting of the pianist's extraordinary and tragic story.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Lying in the Gutter, But Looking at the Stars", June 12, 2008

By 

J Scott Morrison (Middlebury VT, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Lost Genius: The Curious and Tragic Story of an Extraordinary Musical Prodigy (Hardcover)

This book is a triumph of the biographer's art. But the subject of the biography is sad beyond words. Ervin Nyiregyházi (pronounced, approximately NEER-edge-hawzy) was a profoundly gifted musical child prodigy, born in 1903 in Budapest and compared with Mozart in his youth. His first biography, written by Hungarian psychologist Géza Révész in 1910-1914 when the child was only 7-11, is one of the most detailed studies of a child genius ever written. Kevin Bazzana, a Canadian whose previous biography of Glenn Gould was acclaimed, pursued his subject's life story for more than ten years and looked under virtually every stone in search of material about his subject. Other reviewers here have detailed his sad descent from feted prodigy to sex-obsessed skidrow bum with his odd autumn in the sun when he was 'rediscovered' in the 1970s and a few recordings put on the market. Those recordings revealed the wreck of a great pianist, one with an obsession for emotional expression perhaps at the expense of technical finesse. Those records sold rather well and pianistic cognoscenti debated their worth, and still do.

Nyiregyházi considered himself more a composer than a pianist, but frankly little is known of his works. They were apparently typically slow, lugubrious and cryptic; many of them had bizarre autobiographical titles. For instance, toward the end of his life he wrote pieces with titles such as 'Hopeless Vista', 'The Grim Reaper Approaches', 'Time is Running Out', 'With Slow Footsteps Death Approaches'. From the reproduction of one of his pieces, the aforementioned 'Hopeless Vista', one gathers that his style was to write brief, harmonically odd works that attempt to convey a single emotional state. I could make little of 'Hopeless Vista' except that it would certainly not be a crowd-pleaser. Which brings us to the crux of Nyiregyházi's life -- his refusal to make compromises with the public appetite, his profoundly idiosyncratic style of making music, his incredibly inept psychological coping mechanisms and his dependence of a series of ten wives and many other women and men who at least briefly attempted to help him. A psychiatrist/pianist who knew him offered the likelihood of a diagnosis of 'borderline personality disorder', and as a psychiatrist myself I would tend to agree with this diagnosis, dangerous though it be to diagnose without ever having personally examined him. Certainly his tendency to have wildly fluctuating moods over a matter of minutes or hours, his intense interpersonal sensitivity that became outright paranoia at times, his inflated sense of his own importance coupled nonetheless with intense self-doubts, his furious reaction to what he considered insulting behavior of others and his alcoholism and sexual compulsions all point to this severe diagnosis. In short, he couldn't help himself, couldn't stop his inexorable path toward self-destruction. A sad, sad case.

Kevin Bazzana has written a riveting book, not sparing us either the outré details of Nyiregyházi's life nor his brief and soaring triumphs. I found myself unable to put the book down.

Strongly recommended both as a work of art and as a fascinating story.

Scott Morrison

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How can we approach to a genius of the keyboard?, January 19, 2008

By 

Hiram Gomez Pardo (Valencia, Venezuela) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Lost Genius: The Curious and Tragic Story of an Extraordinary Musical Prodigy (Hardcover)

There's always something to discover around the figure of a sheer pianist. Specially of we are talking about the most eccentric pianist the world knew about. You may cite Mr. Gould, but in the case of Erwin Nyiregyhazi we are talking about a sheer artist, a thinker musician, that never gave a affected sound, although he was a Romantic per excellence.

When I had the chance to listen in 1976 his double album "Nyiregyhazi plays Liszt" and listened his performance about The Hungarian Rhapsody No. 3, I could not believe such high caliber pianism, his sound was indeed profound, revealing and sumptuously expressive: His octaves, tremolos, arpeggios and fortes were really amazing. But when I listened Mosonyi' s Funeral Procession I understood why he was so highly acclaimed. He really played the piano as it was an orchestra, a full rounded sound with an astonishing sense of the span.

Of course you may argue he played some wrong bars here and there, but what does it matter ? , when you know about his main target was to capture the essence of the work.

Kevin Bazzana gives a very detailed account about his personality, his obsessive way of living (after all, the excesses have always been a trademark in the spirit of all Romantic don' t you?).

What we really regret was his personal decision to exile himself for so long. Certainly his reappearance in 1973 was motive of jubilee all over the world.

To get close this artist of the piano demands a total obliteration of all our mental map and to assist to a true artistic experience with all its in and outs.

A penetrating and passionate biography about the most eccentric pianist of the XX Century.

Here you have a brave opinion of Mr. Nyiregyhazi: "My approach is a combination of instinct and conscious morality. It is not 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."