“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 [Bobby] Fischer’s death in Iceland

Wall Street Journal: 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.

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 [...]