Géza Csáth's Musicographical Work and His Fundamental Aesthetic Viewpoints

In this paper the musicographic significance of the essays on music and the musical criticism of Hungarian novelist Géza Csáth is discussed on the basis of lexicographic entries and the few scholarly papers in which some of his views are present. The picture of this music critic is completed by a brief account of the problems of a stylistic determination of his literary œuvre, as well as of the importance of psychoanalysis for his artistic creativity and activity. There are three main problems in Csáth's writings on music: support of modernism in music, advocacy of national style in artistic music, and emphasis on the importance of artistic individualism; while the first two problems are mentioned in several scholarly works, the third – Csáth's insistence on artistic individualism – has not been the subject of musicological consideration. Likewise, Géza Csáth's aesthetic views on music have not even been identified, though he was a highly educated critic who was among the first to recognize the importance of Béla Bartók and to support impressionism, expressionism and tendencies towards atonal music. Csáth's aesthetic attitudes were clearly influenced by Darwinism and the positivism of the late nineteenth century; yet, in his essays on music, we find much more than an organicistic and psychologistic interpretation, and that is a deeper understanding of the connection between artistic music, the cultural climate, and the changing needs of audiences at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.