Nyíregyházi plays Othello Death Scene by Giuseppe Verdi (Score Animation)

Ervin Nyíregyházi (1903, Budapest - 1987, Los Angeles) at the opera...

Morte di Otello... Otello draws a knife and kills himself, kissing Desdemona as he dies...

Nyíregyházi was reluctant to play the standard repertoire and favored performing his own crashing transcriptions of operatic works...
You can hear his characteristic depth of tone and free, expressive, creative style of playing. Pianism doesn't get much more intense than this.
He was a living link to a flamboyantly romantic performance practice that had largely disappeared. Nyíregyházi despised objectivity, accuracy - the whole tradition, most notably represented by Toscanini, of exact fidelity to the score. "The performer's first duty, he said, was not to the composer but to his own life and personality, his own thoughts and feelings."
There are no proper recordings of him in his prime. He was only recorded later when he hadn't owned a piano or practiced properly in 40 years and he was usually very drunk. Kevin Bazzana released a book about his remarkable life (he had ten wives before his death, one of whom tried to murder him and one of whom was the mother of a previous wife), called "Lost Genius".

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Nyíregyházi plays Othello Death Scene by Verdi (Documentary):
   • Nyíregyházi plays Othello Death Scene by G...  

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