Christian Georges Cziffra (; born Cziffra Krisztián György; 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 István Thomán, who was a favourite pupil of Franz Liszt. Born in Budapest, he became a French citizen 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 died in Senlis in 1994 aged 72. 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". 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 Yolande 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 Franz Liszt Academy under the tuition of Ernő Dohnányi until 1941, when he was conscripted into the Hungarian Army. He gave numerous concerts in Hungary, Scandinavia and the Netherlands. Later years Hungary was allied with the Axis during the Second World War. Cziffra had just married his wife Soleilka, who was pregnant when he entered military training. His unit was sent to the Russian front; however he was captured by Russian partisans and held as a prisoner of war. After the war, he earned a living playing in Budapest bars and clubs, touring with a European jazz band from 1947 to 1950 and earning recognition as a superb jazz pianist and virtuoso. After attempting to escape Hungary in 1950, Cziffra was again imprisoned and subject to hard labour in the period 1950–1953. In 1956, he