Nyiregyhazi’s life and career began very promisingly, but for whatever reason things never came to be, and he ended up at the very bottom of society instead where he lingered in obscurity for decades before eventually being rediscovered as a wrecked drunkard in San Francisco in the early 1970s. The story of this is somewhat apocryphal - word is that a well-known SF taper at the time essentially saw this Nyiregyhazimofo was about to play in a church he walked past and, always carrying a tape recorder in case any great forgotten pianists should appear, he slipped in and taped it. Impressed, or at least perplexed, he sent the recording to some friends from where word about him began to spread. However, when I talked to this taper around the turn of the century, he was as surprised as I was to hear the story, and could not come up with a tape of the concert, which I supplied him with instead.
In any case, this Old First Church recording exists, along with maybe ~20 more private tapes, ~six studio sessions from which CBS released a few LPs, and a documentary Greg Benko convinced the CBC to produce - all this from the 70s and 80s - along with a few broadcasts and film soundtracks from the 30s and 40s (I don’t have access to my list at the moment, but can soon paste in what I have - which is most of what’s around, but not everything). However… if you ask me at least, that EN was a great pianist is as much humbug as that Sorabji was a great composer. In both cases the only evidence we have to go by sound absolutely awful, and we’re told by their proponents it’s so advanced it’s beyond human comprehension to fully appreciate it. In my opinion there’s just nothing there - there’s zero musical value to any surviving recording we have of him, and while he certainly was a prodigy with a good deal of talent… he was a prodigy which, as things would unfortunately turn out, never amounted to anything. At least not effectively, from what we can appreciate today. Still, the story is fascinating, the hype overwhelming, the playing at least “original”, if one is interested in that for its own sake, and every pianophile will go through a period of intense EN exploration to try to figure him out.