Lost Genius

The Curious and Tragic Story of an Extraordinary Musical Prodigy

Contributors

By Kevin Bazzana

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Price

$11.99

Format

ebook

Format:

ebook $11.99

This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around March 17, 2009. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

Born in Budapest in 1903, Ervin Nyiregyhá (nyeer-edge-hah-zee) was composing at two, giving his first public recital at six, and performing all over Europe by eight. He was soon recognized as one of the most remarkable child prodigies in history and became the subject of a four-year study by a psychologist. By twenty-five, he had all but disappeared. Mismanaged, exploited, and insistent on an intensely Romantic style, his career foundered in adulthood and he was reduced to penury. In 1928, he settled in Los Angeles, where he performed sporadically and worked in Hollywood. Psychologically, he remained a child, and found the ordinary demands of daily life onerous — he struggled even to dress himself. He drank heavily, was insatiable sexually (he married ten times), and lived in abject poverty, yet such was his talent and charisma that he numbered among his friends and champions Rudolph Valentino, Harry Houdini, Theodore Dreiser, Bela Lugosi, and Gloria Swanson. Rediscovered in the 1970s, he enjoyed a sensational and controversial renaissance. Kevin Bazzana explores the brilliant but troubled mind of a geniune Romantic adrift in the modern age. The story he tells is one of the most fascinating – and bizarre — in the history of music.

Genre:

On Sale
Mar 17, 2009
Page Count
256 pages
Publisher
Da Capo Press
ISBN-13
9780786731626

Kevin Bazzana

About the Author

Kevin Bazzana is the author of Wondrous Strange, a biography of Glenn Gould, winner of the Toronto Book Award and an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award. He lives in Brentwood Bay, British Columbia.

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