100 years of György Cziffra

Maestro, magician or mountebank? To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of the legendary and controversial Hungarian-French pianist, Warwick Thompson takes a look at his extraordinary life and career

From stealing trains to months of imprisonment, Warwick Thompson is mesmerised by the life (and the music) of this extraordinary Hungarian virtuoso

If you search for Cziffra videos on YouTube, some of his performances come with a health warning. Take Liszt’s Grand Galop Chromatique for example. My goodness, the technique he displays: it’s positively frightening. But he goes off-piste too. He adds bits. He rearranges the structure. ‘Try not to get lost!’, advises the uploader, who helpfully jump-cuts the score back and forth so you can follow. People who love Cziffra’s playing adore his freedom and wildness: but naturally, these are also the very same qualities which drive his detractors nuts. ‘I divided the profession,’ he wrote in his 1977 memoir Cannons and Flowers. ‘I became its Antichrist due to my improvisations.’ A recent survey of Cziffra in Gramophone magazine repeats the criticisms. ‘It was felt that

Cziffra used composers as a springboard for personal excess and idiosyncrasy… The public, weary of such exaggeration turned elsewhere in search of greater depth and spiritual refreshment.’ Maybe this is the reason that Cziffra never had a big career in the USA: he was just too much of a showman.

He was sometimes called a ‘circus-virtuoso’ for his astonishing technical abilities and his hair-raisingly difficult transcriptions. His Flight of the Bumblebee in octaves has to be heard to be believed. But, as well as being a snide piece of snobbery, the circus jibe has an element of truth. He really had been a circus performer. As a desperately poor and physically weak little boy of five, in Hungary, he had impressed some travelling clowns with his improvisational skills, and been offered a slot in the big

tent. He was so small, that he was lifted up to his performing platform in the palm of a strong-man. Spectators would shout out names of popular tunes, and tiny little György would improvise fantasias upon them.

It’s one of only a myriad of extraordinary facts about Cziffra and his improbable life. He once knocked a man unconscious with a harmonica, and singlehandedly stole a steam train from an army; a mysterious pedlar who once helped him gain entry to the Liszt Academy as a child, later reappeared in his life to torment him; he was imprisoned with hard labour for nearly three years for attempting to leave Soviet Hungary, and his punishment was to carry blocks of cement weighing 60 kilos, ruining his wrists and tendons; he was one of the most highly regarded jazz pianists of post-war Budapest… and so the list goes on.

Even his name comes in more than one guise – György, Georges, and even sometimes plain old English George. Will the real György Cziffra please stand up?

Secrets and lies

He was born into a situation of abysmal poverty, in Budapest, in 1921. His father, who seems to have had some gypsy blood in him, had worked as a relatively prosperous cabaret artist in Paris, playing the piano and cimbalom. During World War I he was expelled from France as an enemy alien, and had all his property confiscated. After the war, work was impossibly scarce. Thus when little György came along, the family were living in a damp, single-room shack in a Red Cross shanty-town on the outskirts of Budapest called Angel Court.

György’s older sister Yolande worked as a skivvy, but miraculously earned just enough to rent an upright piano, which she taught herself to play. According to the memoir Cannons and Flowers, our mesmerized three-year-old hero would watch her from his bed (a sack on the floor) and follow her fingerings on his own thigh. This is how he says he learned to play, even if in the 1973 documentary Cziffra: Le pays retrouvé (it’s on YouTube), he claims instead that his father taught him. No mention of Yolande. Nothing is ever quite straightforward with Cziffra.

His astonishing talent for playing by ear, and for improvisation, was immediately apparent. At five, as we have seen, he was in the circus for a few weeks until ill health forced him to retire. When he was nine, a rackety local pedlar turned up who bizarrely claimed that he could arrange an audition at the Liszt Academy. He told the boy to be at the director’s house at a certain time. It turned out to be a complete fabrication but György’s desperate mother, having paid for two expensive tram tickets to make the journey, pleaded for an audition with the unwilling director anyway. The boy so astonished him, that he was admitted as the youngest ever pupil of the Academy.

This mysterious and mendacious pedlar later reappeared in his life – could you make it up? – as one of a group of secret-police torturers, who worked their hideous craft on György after he tried to defect to the West in 1950. ‘I helped you because of your priceless gift! And now you’re a traitor… We’ll break you until you crawl in the dust!’

War-weary virtuoso

After his studies at the Academy, György married a Romanborn Egyptian woman called Soleilka. He was called up to the army before their son, György Junior, was born – and also before his career as a pianist could have any hope of taking off.

The military passages of his memoir make grim, but also sometimes humorous, reading, and give a sense of Cziffra as someone who was instinctively anti-authoritarian, but also terribly fatalistic. The most extraordinary passage details his wish to desert the Hungarian army (an Axis power, of course) and join the Allies (which in this case meant the Russians). Despite knowing nothing of trains, he got two guards drunk and stole a steam engine, and then drove it into Russianoccupied lands.

The words ‘frying pan’ and ‘fire’ spring to mind.

The rest of his war was wretched, and pushed his dedication to his art to breaking point. If you’re interested in further details of his capture and recapture, the whole memoir is freely available in an English translation by John Hornsby at musicweb-international.com.

After he was demobbed – a year after the conflict had ended – Cziffra tried to pick up the pieces of his life. He rejoined his wife, met his son, and tried to find work back in Budapest. He got gigs as a bar pianist playing popular tunes, and was increasingly successful. When an American jazz band came to

People who love Cziffra’s playing adore his freedom and wildness: but naturally, these are also the very same qualities which drive his detractors nuts

perform, he wangled an audition, and they were so impressed with his improvisations that they hired him on the spot, and compared him to Art Tatum.

Life was looking sweeter, but he still hankered after a classical career. Opportunities were limited in brutal Soviet-controlled Hungary for a poor unknown performer of dubious artistic purity, so he decided to defect to the West with his family. He was betrayed in the attempt, and given nearly three years hard labour. (This is when he was forced to carry the wrist-wrecking concrete blocks mentioned earlier.) His wife received one year in prison, too, and his son was sent to relatives. When he was eventually released, Cziffra needed four months of physiotherapy on his wrists, and always played with a leather strap to support them thereafter.

After some time, by a strange twist of fate which is not entirely explained in the memoir (as you’ve probably inferred, there are many curious gaps in the book), someone high in the Soviet authorities later took a shine to him, and decided to ‘rehabilitate’ him. He was told to learn Bartók’s difficult Second Piano Concerto – in a horribly short space of time – and had a triumph with it. Shortly after, in 1956, he successfully defected to the West (the details, once again, are sketchy) and his international career really took off. He was almost immediately signed by EMI, and based himself and his family in Paris. He became a French citizen, and thus ‘Georges’, in 1968.

Hope and heartbreak

Although he was never rich, his earnings were comfortable. In a wish to help young artists, he bought the derelict medieval Royal Chapel of Saint-Frambourg in Senlis, about 50km north of Paris, in 1973. It was then being used as a car-wrecking space, but over the course of many years, he both donated and raised funds to convert it into a concert auditorium. It now hosts a competition dubbed the ‘Senliszt Festival’ and a regular recital series. In 1966, he also helped found the Chaise-Dieu Music Festival in the Auvergne, which is now one of the largest events of its kind in France.

His son became a successful conductor, and appears on many of Cziffra’s recordings. The two men were very close, and when the younger died in a fire in 1981 (apparently he fell headfirst into an open fireplace while drunk; I’ve seen it written elsewhere that it was suicide), the older never fully recovered. He performed very little after this, and never played with an orchestra again, although he continued to support and encourage young artists. He died in 1994 from a heart attack, after suffering from lung cancer.

A hundred years after his birth, he is now perhaps best known for his transcriptions, his artistic freedom, and his Liszt recordings. Not only was Liszt his compatriot, but the two men shared a fantastical, improvisatory sensibility which unites them in an almost mystical fashion; and they both also held the music of Chopin as the highest pinnacle of keyboard writing.

Was he too free? Or was he a visionary, whose liberty could not be constrained? Only your own ears, heart and soul can answer that question. But I’ll leave you with Horowitz’s take on the matter. ‘Oh, I wish I were Cziffra!’ he said.

Cziffra: The Complete Studio Recordings is out on 29 October (Erato 9029672924). The 41-CD set comprises all the studio recordings made for EMI and Philips from his first 25cm LP released in 1956 when he arrived in Paris, to the last sessions in the Senlis chapel in 1986 a few years before he died.