Eduard Hanslick

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Eduard Hanslick
Music critic
  • aesthetician
  • historian

    • Eduard Hanslick (11 September 1825 – 6 August 1904) was an Austrian

    music critic, aesthetician and historian.[1] Among the leading critics of his time, he was the chief music critic of the Neue Freie Presse from 1864 until the end of his life. His best known work, the 1854 treatise Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (On the Musically Beautiful), was a landmark in the aesthetics of music and outlines much of his artistic and philosophical beliefs on music.[2]

    Hanslick was a conservative critic and championed

    programmatic music for much of his career.[3] As such, he sided with and promoted the faction of Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms in the so-called "War of the Romantics", often deriding the works of composers such as Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner
    .

    Life and career

    Eduard Hanslick was born in

    Marienbad; the composer, noting the young man's enthusiasm, invited him to Dresden to hear his opera Tannhäuser; here Hanslick also met with Robert Schumann.[4]

    Grave of Dr. Eduard Hanslick, Zentralfriedhof, Vienna

    In 1854 he published his influential book On the Beautiful in Music. By this time his interest in Wagner had begun to cool; he had written a disparaging review of the first Vienna production of Lohengrin. From this point on, Hanslick found his sympathies moving away from the so-called 'music of the Future' associated with Wagner and Franz Liszt, and more towards music he conceived as directly descending from the traditions of Mozart, Beethoven and Schumann[5] — in particular the music of Johannes Brahms (who dedicated to him his set of waltzes opus 39 for piano duet). In 1869, in a revised edition of his essay Jewishness in Music, Wagner attacked Hanslick as 'of gracefully concealed Jewish origin', and asserted that his supposedly Jewish style of criticism was anti-German.[n 1] It is sometimes claimed that Wagner caricatured Hanslick in his opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg as the carping critic Beckmesser (whose name was originally to be Veit Hanslich).[7]

    Hanslick's unpaid lectureship at the

    Baden.[citation needed
    ]

    Views on music

    Brahms; cartoon from the Viennese satirical magazine, Figaro
    , 1890

    Hanslick's tastes were conservative; in his memoirs he said that for him musical history really began with Mozart and culminated in Beethoven, Schumann and Brahms. He is best remembered today for his critical advocacy of Brahms as against the school of Wagner, an episode in 19th century music history sometimes called the War of the Romantics. The critic Richard Pohl, of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, represented the progressive composers of the "Music of the Future".

    Being a close friend of Brahms from 1862, Hanslick possibly had some influence on Brahms's composing, often getting to hear new music before it was published.

    Battle of Ostroleka?" (Hanslick 1848, p. 157). The theoretical framework of Hanslick's criticism is expounded in his book of 1854, Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (On the Beautiful in Music), which started as an attack on the Wagnerian aesthetic and established itself as an influential text, subsequently going through many editions and translations in several languages. Other targets for Hanslick's heavy criticism were Anton Bruckner and Hugo Wolf. Of Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto, he accused both Tchaikovsky and the soloist, Adolph Brodsky, of putting the audience "through hell" with music "which stinks to the ear"; he was also lukewarm towards the same composer's Sixth Symphony.[9]

    Hanslick is noted as one of the first widely influential music critics. While his aesthetics and his criticism are typically considered separately, they are importantly connected. Hanslick was an outspoken opponent of the music of Liszt and Wagner, which broke down traditional musical forms as a means of communicating something extra-musical. His opposition to "the music of the future" is congruent with his aesthetics of music: the meaning of music is the form of music. It is along these lines that Hanslick became one of Brahms's champions and often pitted him against Wagner.

    Works (German editions)

    References

    Notes

    1. ^ Hanslick replied to this attack that "my father and all his ancestors were of Catholic peasant stock and came, moreover, from a region where Jews were known only as peddlers."[6]

    Citations

    1. ^ a b Grey 2001.
    2. ^ Grimes 2015, "Introduction".
    3. ^ Grimes 2015, "Absolute Music".
    4. ^ Hanslick 1963, p. 11.
    5. ^ Hanslick 1963, p. 13.
    6. ^ Hanslick 1963, p. 12.
    7. ISBN 0-521-29096-1
      , p.199
    8. ^ Frisch 1990, p. 145.
    9. ^ Hanslick 1963, pp. 302–303.

    Sources

    Further reading

    See Grimes 2015 for an extensive bibliography

    • Ambros Wilhelmer, "Der junge Hanslick. Sein 'Intermezzo' in Klagenfurt 1850-1852". Klagenfurt 1959
    • Ludvová, Jitka. Dokonalý antiwagnerián Eduard Hanslick. Paměti/Fejetony/Kritiky (Praha 1992).
    • Grey, Thomas (1995). Wagner's Musical Prose: Texts and Contexts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    • Eduard Hanslick, "Censur und Kunst-Kritik," Wiener Zeitung, 24 March 1848, republished in his Sämtliche Schriften, vol 1, part 1, p. 157, Ed. Dietmar Strauß
    • Christian Jung:
      Hanslick
      . Kurze Geschichte einer Feindschaft      . In: Österreichische Musikzeitschrift 67 (2012), p.. 14–21.
    • Nicole Grimes et al., ed., Rethinking Hanslick: Music, Formalism, and Expression, University of Rochester Press, 2013

    External links

    Archives at
    LocationUniversity of Toronto Music Library Edit this on Wikidata
    IdentifiersCA OTUFM 32
    Dates1981-2001
    SourceGeoffrey Payzant and Eduard Hanslick collection
    How to use archival material
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