12
Pianist for Hire
Through the 1930s and into the 1940s, Nyiregyházi performed with some frequency around Los Angeles, under various managers. He had not yet lost all hope of a sustained and meaningful career as a pianist, though lowlier appearances in small halls, churches, clubs, hotels, and private homes now greatly outnumbered high-profile concerts. (He performed only occasionally out of town.) Admittedly, the odds were now against him. For one thing, he suffered greatly from stage fright - increasingly so, indeed, as years’ worth of criticism and failure exacerbated his native shyness and anxiety about putting himself before the public. He rarely had regular access to a piano, but, as he liked to say, “A truck driver does not live with a truck in his room.” His technique required little maintenance, and anyway he could practise at a table, he said, by thinking about music while feeling the corresponding sensations in his unmoving fingers. When money was especially tight, he gave piano lessons, though he hated it. “If I could teach how Liszt, Paderewski, and Busoni played, I’d teach, even without pay, but it can’t be taught,” he said. “That comes from God.” His young, mostly female pupils were usually without talent, but he had good relations (and affairs) with some of them. He was at least a kind teacher, dispensing praise but never criticism. He accepted other hackwork, too. A singer once paid him $6 to rehearse with her and accompany her at an audition at MGM, where the woman hearing the audition, the great soprano Mary Garden, had to be reminded that the accompanist whom she pronounced “wonderful” had performed with her at a musicale in New York fifteen years before. Sometimes, his pride asserted itself. The president of a women’s club made him audition for a concert, then made him wait several days for an answer, so wounding him that he refused to perform. Merle Armitage once insisted that he appear as an intermission act for a magician, but he refused; Armitage threatened to drop him and advertised him anyway, but he never showed up - he went to a gangster movie instead. His ego needed to know, periodically, that there was some limit to his abasement.
By his own admission, Nyiregyházi did some of the most artistically satisfying work of his career for the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Established by congressional legislation in April 1935, the WPA was one of Roosevelt’s “New Deal” programs, intended to replace the irregular relief efforts, during the first years of the Depression, of private, union, and governmental agencies. Among those supported by the WPA were artists, under Federal Project Number One (“Federal One”), which opened its first units that fall. Its musical arm was the Federal Music Project (FMP), whose stated goals were “to give employment to professional musicians registered on the relief rolls” and “to establish high standards of musicianship, to rehabilitate musicians, and to educate the public in an appreciation of musical opportunities,” in part by promoting American composers. California boasted one of the busiest and most musically sophisticated programs of the FMP. In January 1938, according to the state’s report, the FMP employed almost two thousand Californians, and operated (among many other musical groups) eleven orchestras, a majority of them in the L.A. area. (Records indicate exactly one FMP employee in the category “Soloists.” Was it Nyiregyházi?) The FMP was accused of elitism, and its director, the Russian-born violinist and conductor Nikolai Sokoloff, had conservative tastes and a bias in favour of “serious” music, but this only worked in Nyiregyházi’s favour.
An avowed admirer of Roosevelt, Nyiregyházi was devoted to the FMP, and worked enthusiastically for both its concert and education divisions. He agreed, for instance, to give recitals in local high schools as exercises in music appreciation and “grass roots” audience building, and on one occasion, in a small town, agreed to play the Tchaikovsky concerto on an upright piano (he was still able, he said, to make the instrument “roar”). In return, he was given free rein to play whatever he liked. His first documented FMP concert was on June 19, 1936: Liszt’s
Totentanz, with the Los Angeles Federal Symphony Orchestra. (For what it’s worth, Genevieve Haugen initiated their sexual relationship after hearing this performance.) At least a dozen more orchestral appearances and recitals are documented; he was a favourite with the orchestras in Southern California.
50 Thanks to the FMP, he had for a time a small but regular salary - $94.08 per month was the figure he remembered.
Reviews of his FMP work were not all favourable, and in some circles he was developing a burdensome reputation as a pounder obsessed with sheer sound. “I am always afraid I’ll disappoint them,” he lamented to a newspaper reporter in 1936. “They think of me as a man who breaks pianos and they want to see me do it.” But this opinion was hardly unanimous. After he played Liszt’s E-flat-major concerto in October 1936, the Examiner called him an “artist of brilliant power, fine reserve and unquestioned musicianship” who “has won an enormous following in recent appearances.” An Examiner review of his performance of the Tchaikovsky concerto on September 23 that year noted that three thousand people had to be turned away from the auditorium, and that the audience “sat spellbound” and then “sprang to their feet with wild acclaim at the end.” The pianist Frederick Marvin still remembers the Liszt performance, which he heard as a teenager: “It was wild.”
Through the later 1930s, with relief efforts less and less a priority for the federal government and hostility toward the WPA growing in Congress, employment quotas slackened and budgets were tightened in Federal One, though the music program did continue, and Nyiregyházi stuck with it to the end. Isabel Morse Jones called him “a phenomenal prodigy, who has never lost his ability to excite an audience,” in her Times review of a concert on Christmas Day 1940, in which he had played the Tchaikovsky concerto. “Nyiregyházi is hard on pianos but his sense of drama and his control of rhythms carry his listeners along with him. . . . The audience applauded between every movement and many rose to cry bravos and demand two encores at the end.”
He gave his last FMP concerts in 1941, at least two joint recitals with singers and a program, in November, of Liszt’s Totentanz and A-major concerto - the last performances he would ever give with an orchestra. By this time, war preparedness was consuming more and more of the federal government’s resources, and the FMP was focusing on building morale and selling war bonds. The bombing of Pearl Harbor that December effectively ended all Federal One projects except those related “directly to winning the war.” By the spring of 1942, the WPA was inactive in L.A., and in June 1943 it was formally terminated.
Nyiregyházi’s success with the WPA was a blip within a downward-sliding career, and his fortunes struck many people as greatly out of proportion to his talent. Nyiregyházi, Tom O’Connor wrote in an
Evening News portrait in the fall of 1936,
is one of those seldom-found people who are just sensitive enough, and just independent enough, not to care a great deal about more money than is necessary for food, clothing, and shelter. When you look at his tremendously high forehead, his full, sensitive lips, his big brown eyes, his long thin face and almost emaciated frame, his straggling unruly hair, you think of some of those early Christian martyrs, children in their faith. When you talk to him, draw out his slow, shy smile, watch his brave attempt not to be embarrassed at talking about himself, his evident desire to be obliging and his wary distrust of strangers, you know a little better what he is: a giant in his music, a naive child in his relationships with the workaday world.
An anecdote related by Donna Perlmutter in the Herald Examiner in 1978 is even more touching. She spoke to a Hungarian woman who had heard Nyiregyházi play in 1937 at the Sisters of Social Service Convent. “The massive sound and passion I heard that day so contradicted what my eyes saw,” the woman recalled. “Here was a man trembling as he walked onstage, horrified with embarrassment. A nun begged me to visit him, knowing I could speak his native tongue. When I arrived at his miserable hovel, he was like a little boy. He wore only one shoe, laced as though by a two year old. His sweater was buttoned incorrectly and his long nails clattered on the keys of a decrepit upright.”
With public outlets for his creativity restricted, and much time on his hands, he did what he could to exercise his teeming brain, his intellectual life having in no way slackened. He still composed prolifically, still read widely. From this period dates a passion for philosophy that came to match his passions for music and chess, Liszt and Wilde. (He particularly admired recondite philosophies, like those of Kant and Hegel, that dealt with transcendental questions.) He also wrote music reviews occasionally for publications including the B’nai B’rith Messenger and Californiai Magyarság. He was always writing, in fact. His papers reveal a compulsion to set down ideas on subjects he was passionate about, even if only for private satisfaction. Killing time in New York, he had toyed with the idea of writing a novel: a pianist with no talent, making his debut, sells out Carnegie Hall at high prices, but, though he plays so badly that “even the critics know it’s bad,” he refuses to refund the money - “and blood flows.”
Around 1935, he began to compile a long, motley book of essays, which, with his usual grandiosity, he titled The Truth at Last: An Exposé of Life. He worked on it for more than a decade, sometimes dictating to women friends who typed, eventually producing more than a thousand pages. The longest (book-length) essay, “The Liszt Problem,” took up the issue of why Liszt’s music was not widely loved, and included detailed philosophical, spiritual, even sociological and political analyses of the meaning of many works, touching on issues like social class and notions of “good taste.” Another essay, “The Libido Must Have the Way Out Whether in the Bedroom or the Concert Stage,” dealt with his approach to musical interpretation, though, more broadly, “was an article about myself, what I like and don’t like in music, sex, food, hotels, etc.” Yet another essay was titled “The Way They Murder the English Language in the United States,” and there were others on Wilde and Mahler, on Dreiser’s American Tragedy, on prostitution and American hypocrisy about sex. He devoted an essay to a criminal case in Connecticut that had intrigued him in the late 1920s, in which a man had been sentenced to death for killing a policeman in the course of a robbery. Nyiregyházi argued that killing the policeman was somehow less dastardly than killing a bystander because the policeman was threatening the robber’s spoils - a perverse position surely aggravated by a poor man’s fear of the instruments of power. There was an essay on Chaplin, too, whom he insisted on calling “Charles”; he described it as an indictment of a society that “laughs at the downtrodden.” Chaplin’s comedies, he said, “are tragic as hell, as tragic as anything Dostoevsky ever wrote.” But The Truth at Last was never published.