Csáth and His Demons

Géza Csáth, born as József Brenner, composed music, painted and wrote already as a teenager. At 14, his first music critic gets published, and he sends a story to Sándor Bródy, the chief editor of the magazine Future. He was raised in Maria-Theresianopel, which started to develop at the turning of the 20th century, but he was craving for living in Pest. Taking his father’s remonstrance, in order to have a secure income, he studied medicine. Meanwhile attending the University, he was writing insistently, his articles were published in ‘Budapest’s Diary’, and he was a member of the literature magazine ‘The West’. As one of the firsts he was taken up with Freud’s tenets and theories, he used the psychoanalysis during his career as a doctor. In his whole life he was in dread of deadly diseases, which he already had to face at a very young age: he was 5 when his mother, and 16 when his sister passed away. When he was -wrongly- diagnosed with lung-disease, he gave himself the first dose of morphine and his willingly contracted fight with his own demons started. The fight, he soon lost: at a young age, crazed by morphine he shot his wife and ended his own life too.

The life-work of Géza Csáth is disappearing and then returning from time to time to the common knowledge of literature. This reading theatre performance tries to evoke the genius of the polymath Csáth with original letters, diary entries, literature plays and music of his, who has still an impact on us today.