Sauer's,godowsky's,and backhaus's budapest recitals in the reviews of géza csáth(1906-1912)

Abstract

©2017 Akadémiai Kiadó,Budapest. This study analyzes the music critiques of Géza Csáth (1887-1919) on the interpretational achievements of the eminent European pianists Emil von Sauer, Leopold Godowsky, and Wilhelm Backhaus, who gave guest performances in Budapest from 1906 to 1912. By comparing Csáth's opinions about the performances of the above mentioned pianists with those of the critics who wrote for Hungarian, German,Austrian, French and Serbian newspapers,the authors arrive to the conclusion that,at the time, artists were being more and more explicitly profiled exclusively as performers,while the practice of both composing and performing one's own compositions, which had been customary, was slowly disappearing. The importance of the chosen critiques by Csáth lies first and foremost in the author's comments, which indicate the changes happening in the piano practice in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century.