Erwin Nyiregyhazi, a Hungarian-born American pianist who dropped out of sight for decades and then
made a remarkable comeback in the 1970s, died of cancer Monday in Los Angeles. He was 84 years old.
Mr. Nyiregyhazi enjoyed a considerable career as a child prodigy in Europe, and then as a young virtuoso
in Germany and the United States in the 1920s. He mightily impressed the composer Arnold Schoenberg when
he heard Mr. Nyiregyhazi play in the 1930s.
But it was only after a recital in San Francisco in 1973, which was privately taped and then circulated
among lovers of Romantic piano playing, that his performing career resumed. He appeared in major cities
and made several recordings.
Harold C. Schonberg, then chief music critic of The New York Times, wrote in 1978: "His playing was like
nobody else's. He orchestrated at the piano, with tremendous surges of tone and color. His tempos, his
conception, his free attitude toward the printed note, his romantic musical mannerisms - all these set him apart.
Born in Budapest on Jan. 19, 1903, Mr. Nyiregyhazi (pronounced NEAR-edge-hah-zee) began to play the piano
at the age of two, and to compose at four. After a first burst of attention as a prodigy, he studied
with, among others, the composer and pianist Ernst von Dohnanyi. He played the Liszt Piano Concerto No. 2
with the conductor Artur Nikisch in Berlin in 1918, and made his enthusiastically received
New York debut in 1920.
But gradually, his career seemed to evaporate, and he increasingly withdrew from public life -
perhaps in part because of a tempestuous divorce case in the 1920s.
By the 1930s, he was living in Los Angeles, which remained his base for the rest of his life. When Schoenberg
heard him in 1935, he wrote the conductor Otto Klemperer of the pianist's "incredible" playing: "Such power
of expression I have never heard before." But while Mr. Nyiregyhazi worked occasionally for Hollywood film
studios and composed some 700 scores (which he refused to make public), he lived in obscurity, in a single room
in a Los Angeles slum and without even owning a piano.
In 1973, admirers persuaded him to play a recital at the Old First Church in San Francisco. The program
included several difficult pieces by Liszt that he had neither played nor studied for 50 years. Yet he played
them to the audience's acclaim, and a tape of that performance came to the attention of Gregor Benko,
a Romantic piano specialist.
Mr. Benko, in turn, arranged for a studio recording session, and for the Ford Foundation to provide the pianist
a stipend. Eventually, CBS Records released several Nyiregyhazi disks. They proved controversial; some listeners
could not accept Mr. Nyiregyhazi's glacial tempos and total dissociation from contemporary performance styles.
But Romantic revivalists were enthralled.
In recent years, Mr. Nyiregyhazi had again dropped from sight.
