The Technicolor splatter of blood on the keys in the corny movie A Song to Remember (1945) is a vulgar incarnation of a romantic image of obsessed genius.  That image has perhaps more authenticity than a few might suppose, for in the shot, the hands on the keyboard actually do belong to an obsessed genius, but one who was not Cornell Wilde pretending to be Frédéric Chopin.  That same elusive figure “stands in” for Henry Daniell as Liszt in Song of Love (1947), and some shots of his left hand appear in The Beast With Five Fingers (1946), and the sounds of the Bach Chaconne emanate from him.  He did receive screen credit for The Soul of a Monster (1944), in which he plays parts of Liszt’s Spanish Rhapsody and his Mephisto Waltz No. 1.  This phantom of the keyboard did indeed leave blood on the keys as has been attested and even urged a friend, coaching his study of Liszt’s Sonata in B minor, to “ruin [his] hands” and leave “blood on the keys.”  This was the Ervin Nyir­egyházi (1903-87) who had lived in the Los Angeles of Arnold Schoenberg, Gloria Swanson, and Bela Lugosi, and who had once given a recital as “Mr. X” wearing a black silk hood; he of the mysterious and controversial reputation that was revived in 1977 by the approved release of a surreptitious live recording.  The sounds obtained from an old piano in a San Francisco church challenge belief.

I will never forget my first audition of that overwhelming performance; something uncanny and unmistakable was happening—something rare, even unique.  I couldn’t miss it any more than I can miss the opportunity Kevin Bazzana has presented, which is to come to grips not with mystery or gossip or obscurity, but with the comprehensible truth of the life of Ervin Nyire­gyházi.  Yes, but I have to say first that this big world is a small one.  By that I mean that I once walked out of a movie and ran into the star of it, just then, just there, who said, “Did you like it?”  I once ran into a distinguished American novelist who was exiting my house just as I was trying to enter it—I suppose everyone has a story like that one.  But I myself also once saw blood on the keys in a rare moment of pianistic ecstasy.  Dr. Carlo Lombardi, professor of music and performer of same, had somehow decided that he would not let a cheap, beaten-up old upright hold him back, never mind the dead keys and the chipped ones, if the divine afflatus descended upon him—and did it ever!  Once he started on the Chopin Scherzo No. 3 in C sharp minor, he went with the impetus and didn’t spare the horses.  Things were going so splendidly that it was no time for caution.  At the end, after he had surmounted the passionate finish in a brilliant fury and an unequaled performance, he left blood on the keys, and me to find the hydrogen peroxide and the Band-Aids.  There was no recording, but there was a memory indelibly charged with a flash of lightning and a whiff of brimstone.

To arrive at such a “moment” requires a particular endowment of nature and nurture.  In Nyiregyházi’s case, that had to do with Budapest before World War I and an environment in which we seem to see Freud and Hollywood in a struggle from the beginning.  The young Ervin was prodigiously gifted, and some of the stories seem incredible until we see that they were attested.  I think that it is safe to refer to the boy as a child prodigy when we learn that he was the subject of the only close scientific study of a single child prodigy: Ervin Nyiregázi: psychologische Analyse eine musikalisch hervorragenden Kindes (Leipzig, 1916)—still in print and still cited.

He was well schooled in Budapest and Berlin, but his home life was dysfunctional.  The death of his father when the boy was 11 was a disastrous blow, particularly since it unleashed his controlling, mercenary mother to have her way.  The boy’s hatred of his mother stunted him for the rest of his life and locked her distortions in place.  Her control mechanisms became his rules: He was “needy,” couldn’t cut his own food, couldn’t button his shirt—for life.  He wanted, even needed, to fail, in order to balk his mother’s exploitative agenda.  Add to these neuroses two major problems: sex and alcohol.  The result was a self-destructive path that put the old man in the San Francisco tenderloin, where, as he said leeringly, you can get anything you want, anytime.  The aged Nyiregyházi still rhapsodized about the revivifying qualities of whiskey and the stimulating services of prostitutes.  The ten wives fit in there somewhere.

Yet Kevin Bazzana has shown that the old man’s braggadocio was fully justified.  He had played as a child at Buckingham Palace, he had wowed them in Berlin, and he liked to present three concertos in an evening.  He revered Franz Liszt and ranked only the great pianists Busoni and Paderewski above himself.

He never grew up, yet to read of his life seems deeply instructive, for Bazza­na has crafted an improbably balanced book about an impossibly unbalanced man.  Bazzana has written previously about Glenn Gould, but even Gould seems tame compared to the extravagantly nutsy Nyiregyházi.  The child prodigy became the childish man, one who proved that he was, in spite of everything, prodigious indeed.  The story as told is a revelation of absurdity, wild humor, and self-imposed suffering—a dialectical ride on the see-saw of degradation and transcendence, an appalling and exalting tour of the mystery of music, and of the heart.

 

[Lost Genius: The Curious and Tragic Story of an Extraordinary Musical Prodigy, by Kevin Bazzana (New York: Carroll & Graf) 383 pp., $28.00]