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Nyiregyházi, James Sample, and the Federal Music Project by Kevin Bazzana (6. 2008) |
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In
Lost Genius, I devote most of Chapter 12, “Pianist for Hire,” to
Nyiregyházi’s work with the Works Progress Administration’s Federal
Music Project, one of the Roosevelt Administration’s “New Deal”
programs during the later years of the Great Depression. An avowed
admirer of FDR, Nyiregyházi was devoted to the F.M.P., and performed as
a recitalist and concerto soloist in many of its public and educational
concerts in the Los Angeles area. Through the F.M.P., he had for a time
a small but regular salary—$94.08 per month—and, by his own admission,
did some of the most artistically satisfying work of his career.
His first documented F.M.P. concert was on June 19, 1936, in Liszt’s
Totentanz, and at least a dozen subsequent appearances are documented;
there were presumably more, for he was a favourite with the federal
orchestras in Southern California. Alas, he made only one recording for
the F.M.P., of a not-very-interesting five-minute novelty: “Before the Dawn,”
from Deserted Garden, by the local composer Cameron O’Day Macpherson,
which he recorded in 1936 with Modest Altschuler and the Los Angeles
Federal Symphony.
Nyiregyházi performed concertos for the F.M.P. most often under
Altschuler’s baton, but he also collaborated with the young American
conductor James Sample (1910-1995). Trained as both a pianist and a
conductor, Sample conducted and taught in his hometown, Minneapolis,
then studied and guest-conducted in Europe (his teachers there included
Pierre Monteux), before moving to Los Angeles in 1937 to lead symphonic
concerts and operas for the F.M.P. Beginning in 1942, he conducted at
the Metropolitan Opera and the City Center Opera, in New York, and in
the decades that followed he held positions in cities including San
Bernardino, Hollywood, Los Angeles, Portland (Oregon), Erie
(Pennsylvania), and Fort Wayne (Indiana). In 1982, he retired from
conducting to devote himself to composing and coaching advanced vocal
students. He died in 1995. (Wikipedia has a mostly accurate, if sketchy, article on Sample.)
Recently I was
put in touch with a member of Sample’s family (who wishes to remain
anonymous), and was given programs for two concerts in which her father
and Nyiregyházi appeared together with the W.P.A. Southern California
Symphony Orchestra, both times in Los Angeles’s Embassy Auditorium. The
first concert, featuring Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, was
presented by the Society of Native American Composers on Christmas Day,
1940. The critic Isabel Morse Jones, in the Los Angeles Times, called
Nyiregyházi “a phenomenal prodigy, who has never lost his ability to
excite an audience.” She went on, “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.” Carl Bronson, in the
Evening Herald and Express, wrote that Nyiregyházi “fairly stampeded
his audience to cheers,” and that his playing called to mind that of
the great late-nineteenth-century Russian virtuoso Anton Rubinstein.
This “intrepid master of technicalities,” Bronson added, “combines so
deeply emotional a fervor with his art as to astound an audience.”
The other Nyiregyházi-Sample concert was on November 11, 1941, and
featured two big piano-orchestra works by Liszt: the Piano Concerto No.
2 in A Major (a Nyiregyházi specialty since his late teens) and
Totentanz. This was Nyiregyházi’s last concert for the F.M.P. (the
whole W.P.A. was terminated not long afterward); moreover, though he
would live for another forty-six years, it was the last performance he
would ever give with an orchestra.
(There was a third concert that featured both Nyiregyházi and Sample—a
concert of the Pasadena Symphony Orchestra on December 17, 1937. In
this case, Sample conducted two orchestral works but it was Altschuler
who joined Nyiregyházi in the Tchaikovsky concerto.)
Alas, though Sample made more than six hundred recordings in just his
first two years with the F.M.P., and though some F.M.P. concerts were
broadcast on the radio on the West Coast, in programs like Standard
Hour, no recordings of concerts featuring Nyiregyházi have ever come to
light. (An off-the-air acetate recording of the Standard Hour broadcast
of his October 1936 F.M.P. performance of Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1
apparently once survived—perhaps still does—but its whereabouts are
unknown.)
In
taped interviews with a member of his family in 1992, when he was
eighty-two, Sample reminisced about his career—including Nyiregyházi:
Ervin
Nyiregyházi is a famous Hungarian pianist who at one time was
Paderewski’s chief competitor and had quite a history. He was a
marvelous pianist, but quite a character. He had such a heavy touch,
especially with Liszt, that at times his fingers would bleed. I
remember the first time he played with me. I came off-stage to say good
morning. He had adhesive tape around his fingers, and I said, “What in
the world is the matter with you?,” and he said “Oh, that’s to keep my
fingers from slipping on the keys when they bleed.” He was very famous
at one time. Each time he played a Liszt [concerto] the hall was jammed
full. Later on he was rediscovered. I could make a couple of tapes on
Nyiregyházi. He knew what he was doing and we got along fine.
Unfortunately,
Sample never got around to filling up “a couple of tapes” with
recollections of Nyiregyházi—the results would undoubtedly have been
fascinating.
— Kevin Bazzana
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