Category: Daily Dispatch

In “The Beast with Five Fingers” (1946), Peter Lorre plays an unstable musicologist, haunted by the disembodied hand of a murdered pianist, which exhibits a marked predilection for Brahms’ arrangement of Bach’s “Chaconne.”

Max Steiner, who is said to have studied piano with Brahms as a child, makes the “Chaconne” the basis of his score, to the extent of orchestrating it for several key sequences. I fail to mention, Brahms wrote the piece for left hand alone. Get it?

It’s possible the piano is played on the film’s soundtrack by Victor Aller, the brother-in-law of Felix Slatkin (that is, Leonard Slatkin’s uncle). But many sources also credit Ervin Nyiregyházi.

I venture to guess, you are probably unfamiliar with Nyiregyházi, and perhaps even more so at a loss as to how to pronounce his name. (It’s said kind of like “Nyeer-edge-ha-zee.”)

Nyiregyházi was a child prodigy, born in Budapest in 1903. He studied with Ernő Dohnanyi and Frederic Lamond, a pupil of Franz Liszt. At 15, he played Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Arthur Nikisch. His Carnegie Hall debut two years later drew mixed reviews, with critics lauding his “brilliant technical equipment,” “originality” and “white heat of sincerity, conviction of faith,” but notably less enthusiastic about his “erratic” conceptions and “arbitrary disregard of the obvious intentions of the great composers.”

Oh, please. Nyiregyházi was obviously a pianist in the great Romantic tradition. Parallels have been drawn between his technique and that of the great Liszt himself.

No less than Arnold Schoenberg, high priest of dodecaphonic music, who philosophically disagreed with many of the pianist’s interpretive choices, fairly gushed about him in a letter to Otto Klemperer: “What he plays is expression in the older sense of the word…. The sound he brings out of the piano is unheard of… although he appears to be a man of intelligence and not just some flaccid dreamer…. Such fullness of tone I have never encountered before…. One never senses that it is difficult, that it is technique – no, it is simply a power of the will, capable of soaring over all imaginable difficulties in the realization of an idea.”

Unfortunately, Nyiregyházi was hobbled by a traumatic childhood. That he hated his mother is no understatement. (As a result of her coddling, he literally did not know how to tie his own shoes.) Whether or not she was the underlying cause of his lack of confidence, I leave it for others to divine, but by his early 20s, he started to self-combust.

First, he sued his concert manager, alleging that he was being treated as an inferior artist. Nyiregyházi lost the suit, which led to his being blackballed in the industry. On some level, his lashing out was likely a reflection of his own insecurity. He avoided playing the standard repertoire out of fear of being compared to other pianists. By the time Schoenberg heard him, he was nearing a dead end.

Nyiregyházi would marry ten times. One of his wives attacked him with a knife; he divorced another because she yawned during one of his concerts. He lived most of his life in poverty, and was reduced to sleeping in subway stations and on park benches.

In 1928, at the age of 25, with six dollars in his pocket, he moved to Los Angeles. There he found work playing piano reductions of film scores. Eventually, he worked as a hand double in movies like “A Song to Remember” (the Chopin biopic starring Cornel Wilde), “Song of Love” (about the Schumanns and Johannes Brahms, with Katharine Hepburn, Paul Henreid, and Robert Walker – and Henry Daniell as Liszt), and possibly “The Beast with Five Fingers.”

But Nyiregyházi was bad with finances, had taken to drink, and had little clue how to manage his own career. In 1946, he appeared in concert wearing a black hood and billed himself as “Mr. X – Masked Pianist.” It’s said that he didn’t own a piano for 40 years.

Late in life he reemerged, both in concerts and on studio recordings. By that point, he was in his 70s, and critics were still divided, praising him on the one hand as “Franz Liszt reincarnated,” and on the other deriding him as “slipshod” and “amateurish.”

He declined a lucrative offer to return to Carnegie Hall. Instead, his last concerts were given in Japan. He died of cancer in L.A. in 1987 at the age of 84.

Among his own original compositions (he composed over a thousand) were works with titles like “Goetz Versus the Punks,” “It’s Nice to be Soused,” “Shotgun Wedding,” and “Vanishing Hope.”

Tormented and self-destructive, Nyiregyházi nevertheless earned many notable fans, including Bela Lugosi, Gloria Swanson, Jack Dempsey, Theodore Dreiser, Rudolf Valentino, and Harry Houdini.

He made some Ampico piano rolls in the 1920s, and as mentioned, some studio recordings 50 years later. But the latter were made at the far end of a rough life. Beyond anything he may have done for the movies, there were no recordings made when Nyiregyházi would have been in his prime. Written accounts of his concerts and critical discernment of his technique, filtering out the imperfections of those late records, offer frustrating glimpses of what might have been.

If you’re interested to learn more about this most eccentric pianist, there was a book written about him in 2007, “Lost Genius: The Curious and Tragic Story of a Musical Prodigy,” by Kevin Bazzana.

In the meantime, you’ll find more – much more, and sufficiently lurid – here:

THE FALL AND RISE OF ERVIN NYIREGYHAZI, L.A.’s SKID ROW PIANIST

1924 piano roll of Franz Liszt’s Transcendental Etude No. 4 in D minor, “Mazeppa”

“Nyiregyházi Plays Liszt,” from 1974

1978 Canadian Television documentary

“The Beast with Five Fingers” trailer