Georges Cziffra (piano) (1921–1994)

Cziffra's memoirs, published in 1977, are both fascinating and frustrating. On the one hand, his story of growing up in extreme poverty, learning to play the piano by listening to his older sister practice, his first time playing for money at age 5 in a passing circus, and his admission to the Liszt Academy in Budapest at age 9 before he even knew how to read music, are compelling. He speaks very little of his time at the Academy, however, except to mention that by age 10 he was placed in master classes with students more than twice his age. The story really resumes when he is drafted into the Hungarian Army (allied with Nazi Germany) to fight a losing war on the Eastern Front with the Soviet Union. By pure chance, he gets a chance to play for a German general, who talks about taking him to Berlin and introducing him to Richard Strauss. But, as Cziffra contemplates the extraordinary opportunity, he realizes that with his gypsy blood, his Egyptian wife, and his somewhat dark skinned young son, he is unlikely to be accepted into Aryan Germany. So, he does what everyone else would do. He steals the General's train and heads into enemy territory. He is able to drive the train because, helpfully, the controls are labeled. Also, I presume that, like the piano, he just naturally figures it out. He doesn't know how to make the train stop, however, but manages to put it in reverse and jump out when it slows down. Soon, he is captured by Hungarian Partisans, and held in a cave for months, before knocking someone over the head with a harmonica to escape. This gives him a chance to play the organ in a church converted to a hospital for the many wounded and maimed--but he leaves shortly afterwards, just in time before the church is destroyed by a huge Russian shell. He is re-captured by the Partisans and not freed again until the Soviet Army controls the territory. In time, he is assigned to a new Soviet-allied Hungarian Army, where again he gets another chance to perform on the piano for a special event--but drinks too much beforehand and turns in a disappointing performance, although perhaps the audience can't tell. Upon release from the army, he finally finds his way back to Budapest and his family for a joyous reunion. But employment is hard to find, and he ends up working as a jazz musician, which takes full advantage of his incredible ability to improvise. As opportunities in Hungary are very limited, he decides to escape to the West, and is promptly captured and sent to a labor camp for almost 3 years, where he has to carry heavy blocks of stone up six flights of stairs, straining his hands. Upon release, he has been such a model worker that he is offered a job as a foreman by the construction company! Not interested, he finds more jobs as a musician and after a time, a miracle occurs, as he is approached by the Government and given the opportunity to return to classical music. This takes an incredible amount of effort on his part to re-train himself to play pieces more as they have been written and to tone down his own style. He is not completely satisfied with the results at first, but he perseveres. With the Hungarian uprising in 1956, he and his family are finally able to escape to Austria and later move to France, where he restores an old church and sets up a foundation to help young musicians.

While Cziffra sprinkles a few observations about piano playing throughout the story, these are brief. Some of them include his belief that by not learning music at the same time he was learning piano, he was able to concentrate more on the actual playing rather than having to constantly move back and forth between the printed score and the keyboard. He also talks about the benefits playing jazz gave him. At the end of the book, he quotes some passages from Liszt about Chopin; these clearly also express his own thoughts. But, there is no real detail about what he did at the Liszt Academy, how he was taught there, or very much about his career after leaving Hungary. I guess he assumes those reading the book probably already know about it. He also doesn't say anything about how he actually met his wife--an Egyptian born in London, or about what happened to his parents, who struggled so much to help their children survive in the slum where they grew up. There is, however, a dissertation online that fills in some of the gaps about his musical education before the war and about his performances after returning to the concert halls in Hungary: https://libres.uncg.edu/ir/uncg/f/umi-uncg-1617.pdf, Chapter IV.… (mehr)