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Eduard Hanslick (1825–1904)

Hanslick was the most powerful music critic of his age and the founder of musical formalism — the view that music’s meaning and beauty lie in its tonal forms themselves, not in the emotions it might depict or arouse. His short treatise On the Musically Beautiful set the terms for the modern argument over what, if anything, music means.

Eduard Hanslick (1825–1904), Bohemian-born Austrian music critic and aesthetician. Born in Prague and died in Baden, near Vienna. Trained in law and music, he became from 1864 the chief music critic of Vienna’s Neue Freie Presse — the most influential musical voice in the city — and from 1870 professor of the history and aesthetics of music at the University of Vienna, among the first to hold such a chair. An early admirer of Wagner, he turned decisively against him.

Key concepts

The musically beautiful. In Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (On the Musically Beautiful, 1854), Hanslick argued that the content of music is neither the representation nor the arousal of definite feelings but tönend bewegte Formen — “tonally moving forms,” shapes set in motion in sound. Music’s beauty is specifically musical: it resides in the play of melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic figures, not in anything extra-musical they might be taken to point at.

Against the aesthetics of feeling. He attacked the reigning Gefühlsästhetik — the doctrine that music’s purpose is to portray or excite emotion. A piece may stir feelings, but that is an effect, not its content and not the measure of its worth; the same words and feeling can be set to opposite music, and a work can be grasped as beautiful without any emotion being named. Form is not the vehicle of the content; in music, form is the content.

Absolute music. Hanslick became the great champion of absolute — autonomous, instrumental — music, and of Brahms as its living exemplar, against the “Music of the Future”: Wagner, Liszt, and the New German School, whose programme music and music-drama bound music to words, drama, and depicted scenes. The opposition made him the critical general of one wing of the War of the Romantics.

The Wagner feud

Wagner, whom Hanslick had once praised, turned on him sharply; a revised version of his essay Das Judenthum in der Musik (1869) attacked Hanslick in antisemitic terms, fixing on his partly Jewish ancestry. It is widely held — though disputed by scholars — that the pedantic, rule-bound town clerk Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg is a caricature of Hanslick; an early prose draft named the character “Veit Hanslich.” The episode made Hanslick, for later generations, the type of the conservative critic set against the artist of the future — a reputation his actual position only partly fits.

Where Hanslick stops

Hanslick’s formalism is often read as more absolute than he meant it. He did not deny that music has expressive character: he allowed that the motion of music can run parallel to the dynamics of feeling — rising and falling, hurrying and resting — only denying that definite, nameable emotions are music’s content. Where exactly the line falls between “tonally moving forms” and the expressive life they seem to carry he never settled; it is the question his book opened and left open, and the one the philosophy of music has argued over since. And his authority was partisan: a critic who advanced the conservative camp — Brahms above all, against Wagner, Liszt, Bruckner, and later the moderns — so that his judgements carry his aesthetics and his allegiances together.

Key works

See also: Music and meaning · Schopenhauer · Langer