Christian Georges Cziffra (; 5 November 192115 January 1994) was a Hungarian-French virtuoso pianist and composer. He is considered to be one of the greatest virtuoso pianists of the twentieth century. Among his teachers was Ernő Dohnányi, a pupil of István Thoman, who was a favourite pupil of Franz Liszt.
Born in Budapest, he became a French national in 1968. Cziffra is known for his recordings of works of Franz Liszt, Frédéric Chopin and Robert Schumann, and also for his technically demanding arrangements or paraphrases of several orchestral works for the piano, including Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's Flight of the Bumblebee and Johann Strauss II's The Blue Danube. Cziffra left a sizeable body of recordings.
He lived in Senlis, a commune northeast of Paris, where he ran a foundation for young musicians and artists.
Early years
Cziffra was born to a poor Romani family of musicians in Budapest in 1921. In his memoirs, Cziffra describes his father, a player of the cimbalom, as "a cabaret artist". The family lived in poverty. His father, Gyula was unemployed, and the family income was earned by Cziffra’s mother Ilona and his elder sister, Jolán. His parents had lived in Paris before World War I, when they were expelled as enemy aliens.
His earliest exposure to the piano came from watching his elder sister Jolán practice. She had decided she was going to learn the piano after finding a job which allowed her to save the required amount of money for buying an upright piano. Cziffra, who was weak as a child, often watched his sister practice, and mimicked her. He learned without sheet music, instead repeating and improvising over tunes sung by his parents. Later he earned money as a child improvising on popular music at a local circus.
In 1930 Cziffra began to study at the Steinitz Music School, and in 1932 he passed the entrance examination for the Franz Liszt Academy. Here he studied initially under Imre Keéri-Szántó.