György Cziffra was born in Budapest on 5 November 1921 into a poor Romani family of musicians; his father Gyula played the cimbalom. He learned the piano by watching his sister practise and by improvising without written music. He began at the Steinitz music school in 1930 and passed the entrance examination for the Franz Liszt Academy in 1932, studying under Imre Keéri-Szántó. He claimed also to have studied with Ernő Dohnányi and István Thomán, though biographical research by Máté Cselényi casts doubt on whether he did.

Conscripted into the Hungarian army in 1941, he was captured by Russian partisans and held as a prisoner of war. After an attempted escape in 1950 he was imprisoned at hard labour until 1953, forced to carry heavy loads of concrete up flights of stairs, which damaged the ligaments in his wrists; he afterwards often performed wearing a broad leather wristband.

He escaped to Vienna in 1956 with his wife and son. His Paris debut followed in 1957 and his London debut at the Royal Festival Hall in the Liszt concertos, with appearances at the Ravinia Festival and Carnegie Hall. He became a French citizen in 1968. His son György Cziffra Jr., a conductor, died in an apartment fire in 1981, after which Cziffra never again performed or recorded with an orchestra. He died at Longpont-sur-Orge on 15 January 1994, aged 72, and is buried beside his son.

Cziffra is widely described as one of the great virtuoso pianists of the twentieth century, and his reputation rests on the most technically extreme end of the repertoire. He is best known for his Liszt, Chopin and Schumann, and for arrangements and paraphrases of orchestral works, among them Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee and Strauss’s Blue Danube. He wrote a large number of transcriptions of his own, on music by Brahms, Chopin, Dvořák, Falla, Grieg, Khachaturian, Liszt, Offenbach, Rimsky-Korsakov, Rossini, Strauss and Verdi, and left a sizeable body of recordings.

His influence also took an institutional form. In 1977 he founded the Cziffra Foundation at Senlis, housed in the Saint-Frambourg chapel, to help young musicians at the start of their careers.

The record is not one of uninterrupted ascent. Some critics considered that the death of his son in 1981 affected the quality of his playing, and he withdrew from orchestral work entirely from that point.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gy%C3%B6rgy_Cziffra