CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK

By Mark Swed
January 27, 2008

DURING the 1970s, I often spent time in the music room of the L.A. Central Library. One other regular was an elegant, if seedy, older gentleman, always dressed in the same threadbare suit and tie and loath to remove his jacket, even in the summer. He was, I later learned, a famed Hungarian pianist who had fallen on hard times and lived in flophouses downtown.

I’m pretty sure I also saw Bobby Fischer once or twice on the library lawn, where derelicts then gathered, studying a portable chess board. He too, word had it, lived for a period in flophouses downtown.

Did Ervin Nyiregyházi ever notice Fischer? It’s possible. The pianist, who, in his youth in Budapest was called the second Liszt, would have recognized the grandmaster; Nyiregyházi (pronounced NEAR-edge-hah-zee) was passionate about chess and a fan of Fischer.

The two, it dawned on me as I read obituaries of Fischer this month, had much in common. Fischer is widely held to have been the greatest genius the world of chess has ever known. Arnold Schoenberg said of Nyiregyházi, who’s the subject of a new biography, that he was “the person most replete with genius I have ever heard.” Both geniuses became impossible social misfits who self-destructed after spectacular careers.

As it happens, a biography has recently been published of yet another remarkable nut case: Moondog, a composer and performer who became a noted street person in New York in the 1950s and ’60s. I had already been thinking about the surprising similarities between Nyiregyházi and Moondog, who died, respectively, in 1987 and 1999, when the news came of Fischer’s death in Iceland. The initial coincidence that the first biographies of these two inexplicable musical eccentrics would come out about the same time struck me as more than a little curious. But now the links to Fischer seem uncanny — and possibly revelatory.

The two composers’ careers took parallel paths, but they came from radically different worlds. Louis Hardin, who was born in 1916 and who called himself Moondog, was the son of a Midwestern preacher who regularly ran afoul of the church. At 16, the shy, despondent Louis, never recognized as remarkable, was blinded when he found a detonator cap that had been left behind by a construction crew and it exploded. Blindness triggered his mania for music and his fierce independence.

Born in 1903 in Budapest, Nyiregyházi, on the other hand, was by age 6 recognized for having the most perfect pitch ever measured, along with a superhuman memory and a prodigious piano technique. As a long-haired boy in short pants, he was paraded about by ambitious parents like the young Mozart and performed for royalty. He was gifted at chess as well and could beat some of the best in Budapest blindfolded. In 1910, a Hungarian psychologist began a four-year study of the boy, who became the subject of the first book on the nature of child prodigies.

Hardin attended the Iowa School for the Blind and studied music at the Southern College of Music in Arkansas. Nyiregyházi’s first piano teacher had been a pupil of Liszt. The student impressed Richard Strauss, Puccini, Goldmark, Lehár and Reger. He played Buckingham Palace and entertained Bismarck and Einstein.

At 15, Nyiregyházi was forced by his mother to still perform in short pants and keep his hair long, preposterously milking his value as a prodigy, until he finally rebelled. Hardin, in exactly the reverse fashion, would eventually grow unfashionably long hair and design his own preposterous clothes. Nyiregyházi was pampered as a child and could barely button his shirt. Moondog was so fiercely independent that he insisted, though blind, on sewing his own clothes. Nyiregyházi was a natty tidiness freak; Moondog was a hopeless slob whose trademark became the Viking helmet that he took off, most of his life, for no one.

Yet the personalities of Hardin and Nyiregyházi are described in nearly identical terms in Robert Scotto’s “Moondog: The Viking of Sixth Avenue” and Kevin Bazzana’s “Lost Genius: The Curious and Tragic Story of an Extraordinary Musical Prodigy.” Bazzana — whose book is quite a page turner (Scotto’s prose is more labored) — writes of Nyiregyházi that he was introverted, shy, neurotic, deeply melancholic, paranoid, bitter, angry, resentful, defiant, quick to hurt. His sense of entitlement was extraordinary. One critic called him “a mad dog.” The same or similar terms turn up in the Moondog biography.

Hardin and Nyiregyházi both rebelled against censorious mothers (the former’s cold and distant, the latter’s a stage mother from hell), broke off from their families and fled to New York the first chance they got. And before long, both wound up on the street.

When he arrived in New York in the early ’20s, Nyiregyházi wowed audiences, impressed critics, amazed colleagues. But his career went nowhere. He was high-minded, easily insulted and easily victimized by unscrupulous managers. He was easily distracted by women as well. His life became a series of highs and lows — one minute part of glittering society, the next down and out. Sometimes he was in demand in the great concert halls; at other times he was forced to play parties to pay for his drinks.

The young Hungarian discovered sex late but became, and remained, obsessed with it. He married for money, married for love, married for sex, married for convenience. In the end, he’d had 10 wives, along with hundreds of affairs. He claimed it was his tremendous libido that made him the tremendous pianist he undoubtedly was.

Moondog moved in and out of celebrity too. During his first years in New York in the early ’40s, he sort of fit into the bohemian world. He was a proud bum who wrote his own quirky music, invented his own quirky instruments, made his own quirky clothes and panhandled. In 1947, he began calling himself Moondog.

Early on, he caught the attention of Artur Rodzinski, music director of the New York Philharmonic and a conductor with a spiritualist bent. Rodzinski thought Moondog had the face of Christ and invited him to rehearsals. Players in the orchestra took Moondog under their collective wing, and he became a good luck charm for the ensemble. Rodzinski’s wife (with whom Nyiregyházi likely had an affair) was alternately attracted to and repulsed by Moondog, with his long hair, long beard and thin, delicate features. But Moondog had no intention of fitting into polite society, sold the fine clothes Rodzinski gave him and managed to offend conductor, wife and players in short order.

It took a while for Moondog to develop his style, but by the late ’50s he had become a New York icon, with his clothes sewn of square patches of fabric and leather and his Viking helmet. He had his spot in Midtown on 6th Avenue, where he played his music, recited his poetry and begged for money. Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Dean Martin, Charlie Parker, Cassius Clay, Leonard Bernstein and Marlon Brando dropped by. Joan Baez named her dog Moondog. In pre-Beatles 1959, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison formed a band, Johnny and the Moondogs. Philip Glass took Moondog in for a year.

But sooner or later, Moondog bit every hand that fed him. He was intolerant. He worshiped Nordic culture. He was anti-Semitic and racist. He married a couple of times but had a reputation for being gross and inappropriate around women. A recording of his music released on Columbia Records in 1969 made him a brief sensation, but it didn’t last.

Nyiregyházi wound up in Los Angeles for the later part of his life, and he was often around celebrities. Fellow Hungarian Bela Lugosi was a kindred spirit. Gloria Swanson took an interest in him. He got a bit of work in the pictures (those are his hands in “A Song to Remember” and “The Beast With Five Fingers”). Schoenberg went to bat for him. But he had a reputation for being a womanizer, a drunk, unreliable, temperamental.

Like Moondog, who eventually emigrated to Germany, where he lived the latter part of his life somewhat better cared for than in New York, Nyiregyházi had a racist streak and a peculiar anti-Semitic one as well. Although he was Jewish, he once called Hitler a great man for killing the pianist’s mother, who died in the Holocaust.

No other pianist like him

A few years after attempting to create a Moondog sensation, Columbia discovered Nyiregyházi and made a Liszt recording that turned him too into a brief sensation. It proved too little, too late. He was too old and too far gone to begin a career all over again. “I’m addicted to Liszt, oral sex and alcohol — not necessarily in that order,” he said at the time.

The Music and Arts label has just released two CDs’ worth of late, live Nyiregyházi performances. Taken from recitals in out-of-the-way venues in San Francisco in the early ’70s and in Japan in the early ’80s, these are weird documents of a riveting, if somewhat demented, pianist who tends to begin a Chopin or Liszt piece in a quiet way and then shocks you with a massive climax. He can be insanely slow or insanely fast or just plain insane. He misses notes but still has an astounding technique. There was no modern pianist like him.

Nyiregyházi wrote, it is believed, more than 1,000 pieces. So did Moondog. And both were bizarre composers. Although none of Nyiregyházi’s music is readily available to hear, Bazzana describes high-minded compositions exalting Caesar, Kant, Dostoevski, Oscar Wilde. He also lists Nyiregyházi’s “Phantasmagoria of Pat Nixon,” “The Beheading of Pat Nixon” and “It’s Nice to Be Soused,” along with an explicit musical description of erotic massage.

Moondog’s music, only a small fraction of which has been recorded, is equally strange, typically starting out simply and gradually building up contrapuntal structures of mind-blowing climactic complexity. Like Nyiregyházi, he was attracted to high-minded classics (particularly Viking lore), moody dirges (“All Is Loneliness”), the erotic (“Ode to Venus”) and the quotidian (“Coffee Beans”). His music has an element of swing, a hint of Minimalism and a lot of Bach. It needs to be better known.

But what to make of these guys? Bazzana and Scotto both take a psychological approach. The mothers loom large in these biographies. But that explains too little, especially about the music. Did these musicians have a neurological screw loose?

Oliver Sacks, in his new book, “Musicophilia,” describes a host of ways that music, for good and ill, can affect the brain. Daniel J. Levitin, in “This Is Your Brain on Music,” looks into musical obsessions and the scientific and emotional components of what goes into making a musician. But the subject is too vast to offer much help when we are confronted with a Moondog or Nyiregyházi.

Fischer’s example, which is more extreme, helps the most. He had many of the same traits as the two musicians, such as the anti-Semitism (he was even more virulent than Moondog and, like, Nyiregyházi, was Jewish). And like music, chess is an activity that requires the mastery of rules of a very strict order. Fischer was so much the master of the rules of chess, as these musicians were of the rules of their art, that he seemed to have no capacity to cope with those of society.

But what I think the cases of all three geniuses ultimately come down to is a hopeless rebellion against the modern world. They simply were not men of their time. Nyiregyházi was the last great 19th century pianist, and his music, no matter how up-to-date its subject matter, was of the earlier century as well. Moondog was entirely unsuited to contemporary life, and he moved further and further away in time, back to Bach and Nordic myth.

For Fischer, the threat was the computer, which had the capacity to destroy the game that was his life. If his became the most extreme case of the three — a fugitive from justice who preached the destruction of America — it was only because he was the youngest and so the threat of the modern age was, for him, the greatest.

Ervin Nyiregyhazi on YouTube

Erwin Nyiregyhazi playing a rare work by Blanchet (‘In the Old Turkish Harem Garden’), in his own free version, preceded by a few words by Gregor Benko.

kevin bazzana

Richard Helm,
Canwest News Service

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

A biography of Sir John A. Macdonald, the tale of an unknown hero of the Holocaust, the story of a forgotten musical genius and two deeply personal family memoirs are the finalists for this year’s Charles Taylor prize, awarded for literary non-fiction.

The short list, culled from a record 137 books submitted by 30 publishers, was announced Tuesday in Toronto.

Veteran journalist Richard Gwyn received a nod for John A.: The Man Who Made Us: The Life and Times of John A. Macdonald, Volume One: 1815-1867 (Random House Canada). The jury described the work as “a lively but thorough biography.”

Anna Porter is a finalist for Kasztner’s Train: The True Story of Rezso Kasztner (Douglas & McIntyre), singled out by the jury for revisiting a man “discarded by history for his efforts to save Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust through intimate dealings with the Nazi regime.”

Kevin Bazzana, who won various literary awards for the biography of Glenn Gould he published in 2003, makes this year’s short list for Lost Genius: The Story of a Forgotten Musical Maverick (McClelland & Stewart). Bazzana writes about Ervin Nyiregyhazi, a Hungarian-born concert pianist and composer and a deeply disturbed musician of extraordinary talent.

David Gilmour, a former culture journalist for the CBC, is also in the running for The Film Club: A True Story of a Father and Son (Thomas Allen Publishers). The book recounts Gilmour’s efforts to connect with his adolescent son, with movies as the metaphor for engagement with adult life.

The fifth and final book in the running is Lorna Goodison’s From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her People (McClelland & Stewart), a testament of love for her mother, Doris, her ancestors and their Jamaican homeland.

This year’s jury is made up of authors Charlotte Gray and J.B. MacKinnon and former Liberal cabinet minister John Manley.

The winner of the prize, to be awarded March 3, gets $25,000. Finalists take home $2,000.

Lost Genius, by Kevin Bazzana

Richard Hyfler, 27 February 2008

An interview with Kevin Bazzana, author of Lost Genius ($28, Carroll & Graf, 2007).

Born in 1903, Hungarian pianist Ervin Nyiregyházi (pronounced air-veen nyeer-edge-hah-zee) played Buckingham Palace at age 8, was the subject of a book by the time he turned 13 and soon enjoyed critical success on two continents.

As an adult, he was an alcoholic, addicted to paid sex and afraid to perform in public on the piano. His career foundered, despite champions as diverse as Bela Lugosi and Arnold Schoenberg, and he spent decades living in poverty, mostly in a succession of cheap hotel rooms in California, even after his rediscovery and a brief period of international celebrity in the 1970s.

Since his death in 1987, fans have created numerous Web sites devoted to his career and the few recordings that are available. Concert recordings from the ’70s have recently been issued on a two-disc set by Music & Arts, CD 1202. But, his biographer says, there are good reasons for music lovers–and particularly musicians–to look beyond Nyiregyházi’s idiosyncrasies.

Forbes.com: Considering Nyiregyházi’s frequent lack of a fixed address or income, it seems a small miracle that so much documentary material on his life has survived.

Bazzana: I was forced to become a detective in order to write Nyiregyházi’s story. He left little footprints all over the world–quite a lot of information, but widely scattered. I had to track it all down and reassemble it in order to tell his story; it took 10 years. If I were writing the story 50 years ago, I would have had to travel all over the world; however, I was able to do almost all of my detective work by long-distance, with only a little travel. Through mail, e-mail, telephone, microfilm, etc., I was able to conduct interviews and acquire information from Hungary, Germany, Scandinavia, England, Japan, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and many other places.

One trove of material proved particularly valuable: the personal effects of Nyiregyházi’s 10th wife, Doris–which included the personal effects of Nyiregyházi himself. After she died in 2001, I was able to study all of her effects, including the results of hundreds of hours of interviews she conducted with him about every aspect of his life and work. She originally wanted to write his biography herself.

I’m confident that I ferreted out most of what is there to be found. Still, he was such an eccentric person, and his life was so bizarre, that I sometimes dread finding, too late, some startling tidbit that wasn’t available to me when I was writing the book. With a character like this, who knows what might be hiding in that one dark corner I wasn’t able to look into while writing the book!

Are there historical figures in music, or in the other arts, who, by virtue of their combination of talent and lack of success, might be compared to Nyiregyházi?

In the conclusion of the book, I wrote: “The spectacularly gifted but psychologically cursed artist who seems reluctant to practice his art is a type uncommon but not unknown.”

When I wrote this, I was thinking of artists like the writer J. D. Salinger, the conductor Carlos Kleiber, the pianist Glenn Gould, the actors Louise Brooks and Marlon Brando, the chess master Bobby Fischer. These are artists of incredible talent and individuality, yet the price of their particular gift was the kind of psychology that seemed not to permit them to enjoy an ordinary career and the high productivity that their fans would have liked.

Salinger simply couldn’t stand being famous, and so refused to be a public figure any longer, even to the point of refusing to publish anything. Kleiber is widely considered the greatest conductor of our time, yet his perfectionism made it scarcely possible for him to conduct; his output was tiny, highly selective–yet of unrivaled quality. Gould had so many personal and musical hang-ups about live performance that he quit the concert scene entirely and retreated to the recording studio. Brooks and Brando simply couldn’t stomach what was required to have a Hollywood career; you are left with the irony of someone of Brando’s talent and individuality being so convinced of the triviality of what he does that he’s scarcely willing to do it anymore! And Fischer, well …

Some of these figures had huge success; some had limited success; some had success and then failure. But what they all had in common was a particular kind of gift that was incompatible with the normal professional exercise of that gift.

It’s a tragedy, really, because those artists with that particular kind of career-sabotaging psychology are often the greatest and most individual of all. We can only sigh heavily, and accept them as they are and be grateful for what little of them we have.

Your previous book, Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould, is also an account of an eccentric pianist. Gould’s style and approach to the piano literature still exert an influence on contemporary pianists. Why should musicians listen to the few existing Nyiregyházi recordings?

Of the two, one could argue that Nyiregyházi was actually the more historically important figure. Gould was a spectacularly gifted and dynamic example of a kind of playing that was increasingly the prevailing trend in his day: All the pianists of Gould’s generation were playing Bach in a more streamlined, transparent, analytical, historically informed style than had been the case previously; Gould was particularly influential but reflected larger trends in performance.

When Nyiregyházi reappeared on the scene in the 1970s, he was a like a living fossil–an authentic representative, still living and playing, of a long-lost style of musical performance. Musicians and critics spoke of Nyiregyházi’s performing style as “old-fashioned,” even when he was a child. The particular kind of hyper-Romanticism he advocated was going out of style with increasing rapidity after the first World War, around the time Nyiregyházi was emerging as a professional.

He represented an approach that was associated with the heyday of Romanticism in the mid-19th century, the era of Liszt, Hans von Bülow, Anton Rubinstein, etc.–pianists who never lived into the recording era. Only a few older pianists who lived to make recordings reflected the kind of arch-Romanticism Nyiregyházi did–Busoni, for instance, and Paderewski.

Nyiregyházi stood apart from the trend toward a less indulgent, more “modern” style of playing, a trend that grew in the years between the wars. It’s no wonder his style made him less and less palatable to critics and fellow musicians as time passed. And when he reemerged he seemed like a genuine specimen of 19th-century Romanticism preserved in amber. Performers of 19th-century repertoire could actually learn a lot from him about what “Romanticism” really means. Nyiregyházi, needless to say, didn’t think much of the “play it the way it’s written” approach of modern performers.

To many modern listeners, Nyiregyházi’s style seems excessive, sentimental, grotesque, self-indulgent, disrespectful, etc.–and yet, when you study what 19th-century musicians had to say about performance, you realize that Nyiregyházi was a more genuine Romantic than those modern performers who play Romantic music in a more “respectful” manner.

People Magazine, March 13, 1978

March 13, 1978, Vol. 9, No. 10

For Pianist Nyiregyhazi, Fame, Unjustly, Is Nine Wives and Ten Photographed Fingers

When I play, it’s as though I am Franz Liszt himself,” says Californian Ervin Nyiregyházi. Even critics accept the braggadocio. A century back, composer Liszt was himself a child-prodigy pianist, flamboyant maestro and herculean womanizer. His reincarnation, also Hungarian-born, was a student of two of Liszt’s disciples, an ex-prodigy who turned prodigal wastrel in the 1920s when he married the first of nine wives. While he casts around roguishly for his 10th, the West Coast recluse is giving the world one more chance, at 75, to hear his overwhelming virtuosity and to exclaim over the underrecognized and always mispronounced name NEAR-edge-ah-zee.

Latter-day fanciers of his 19th-century Sturm und Drang were first re-reminded of Nyiregyházi’s genius when he burned through six of Liszt’s “appassionatas” in a Desmar LP issued 18 months ago by International Piano Archives (IPA). Yet as recently as last December, its performer was living in a seedy Los Angeles area with no hope of a second fling with fame. Then the record was played for the Ford Foundation, which provided $38,000 for the IPA. That grant finally got the old gent into a decent sound studio with a concert grand worthy of his skills and all the hi-fi gadgetry needed to hold his astonishing sonorities (which seem at least a few dozen decibels beyond the power of his frail forearms). On his way to the piano—he hasn’t owned one for 40 years, has an astonishing photographic memory for scores and never did practice much—Nyiregyházi must lean on his cane. But without it he can stand at a bar and down highballs with heroic endurance.

Yet he was stone sober in San Francisco a few weeks ago cutting the astounding tapes subsidized by the foundation. When they were played for distributors in New York, CBS Records rushed in with an offer to mark the old man’s return with a three-LP album—an unprecedented show of confidence in a forgotten artist who has no intention of ever turning up on the recital circuit to promote sales. His records—despite overwrought patches, added and even wrong notes—will drive even some Horowitz and Rubinstein idolators to rank Ervin Nyiregyházi in their class. No expert can deny that he is the world’s greatest at the gaudy craft of freestyle Liszting.

When he made his U.S. debut at Carnegie Hall in 1920, the Budapest native was called “a 17-year-old Paderewski.” Five years later he was tagged in the trade as too temperamental to deal with, and when his career died from litigation with managers and a dearth of recital dates, he turned indigent. “I had to sleep on the New York subway,” he says. In 1926 he married for the first time, a woman 11 years older. Shortly thereafter Ervin was arrested on Madison Avenue wearing purple pajamas. His wife had hidden his pants, suspecting he wanted to visit a girl, which, of course, he did. “I had to run away,” says Nyiregyházi, who went first to the pad of novelist friend Theodore Dreiser and later to California. He has spent the 50 years since lining up and leaving—or being left by—wives. Six marriages ended in divorce; three wives died.

Over the years the pianist moved a number of times from California (where he was naturalized in 1940) to Europe and back while composing 1,300 piano and orchestral scores. To stay at least marginally solvent, he played in WPA orchestras around L.A. (for $94.08 a month) and did Hollywood hack work. His hands were filmed as Chopin’s in the movie of his life and as Liszt’s in Song of Love, the story of Clara and Robert Schumann. And all of Nyiregyházi—with distorted face and fingers punching out a Liszt Mephisto Waltz—starred in the B horror flick Soul of a Monster.

His situation worsened after that, and he moved into the slums, where he was robbed and mugged often enough to learn to stay inside after 6 p.m. In 1972 he performed publicly for the first time in 17 years to pay the doctors’ bills for his most beloved and then dying wife No. 9. The next year he played a few more recitals, including one at a San Francisco church, where he was discovered by an IPA representative, who taped the performance on a portable cassette.

Now, with some riches possibly around the corner, Nyiregyházi thinks there might even be another wife. “It’s a real problem,” he allows. “If I were 10 years younger it wouldn’t be such a hopeless task.” But, unlike exemplar Liszt, he has no intention of trying to live without women by moving into the Vatican. Exults Nyiregyházi: “I never give up hope.”

IMDB describes The Lost Zeppelin:

This film, like Capra’s Dirigible (1931), is also loosely based on the crash of the airship Italia, flown by Umberto Nobile, around May 25, 1928 near the North Pole, and the international rescue effort that cost early polar explorer Roald Amundson his life. The pilot who rescued Nobile also crashed when returning to rescue more survivors and had to be rescued himself.

The Lost Zeppelin - movie poster