Born in 1903, the Hungarian pianist Ervin Nyíregyházi conformed in many ways to the standard image of a child prodigy. He was the subject of a 1916 book entitled The Psychology of a Musical Prodigy and has now found, in Kevin Bazzana, a conventional biographer. . . .

If he was not all that Puccini, Dohnányi, and Schoenberg thought he was, this does not affect the merits of Kevin Bazzana’s book, which delights in the strangeness of its subject without making any wild claims for or against him. The externals of his life suggest a jazz or even rock musician, yet he had a mandarin disdain of pop culture and voted Republican in the 1950s because he thought Eisenhower “had a nice smile and was friendly.” The magic of his playing, if that is the word, only doubtfully survives on the handful of recordings and video clips available. What stands out more clearly is the doctrinaire idea that emotion alone can supply the “foundation” to which Schoenberg alludes in his letter. It is a bleak idea, yet one that acquires a crazy nobility if pushed far enough.