Eduard Hanslick
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Eduard Hanslick (September 11, 1825–August 6, 1904) was a Bohemian-Austrian writer on music, perhaps the most influential music critic of the 19th century.
Hanslick was born in Prague, the son of Joseph Adolph Hanslick, a bibliographer and music teacher from a German-speaking family, and one of his piano pupils, the daughter of a merchant from Vienna. At the age of 18 Hanslick went to study music with Tomášek, one of Prague's most important musicians. He also studied law at Prague University and obtained a degree in that field, but his amateur study of music eventually led to writing music reviews for small town newspapers, then the Wiener Musik-Zeitung and eventually the Neue freie Presse, where he was music critic until retirement. An unpaid lectureship at the University of Vienna led 1870 to a full professorship for history and aesthetic of music and later to a doctorate in honoris causa. Hanslick often served on juries for musical competitions and held a post at the Austrian Ministry of Culture and fulfilled other administrative roles. He retired after writing his memoirs, but still wrote articles on the most important premières of the day, up to his death in 1904 in Baden.
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 known today for his critical advocacy of the music of Brahms and rejection of the music 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 other side, the progressive composers of the "Music of the Future", which also included Liszt. They idolized Wagner, and in some of their more hyperbolic writings assigned him a semi-divine status; conversely, many of them despised Brahms.
Being a close friend of Brahms from 1862, Hanslick possibly had some influence on Brahms's music, often getting to hear new music before it was publicly premièred. Although Hanslick recognized Wagner's genius, and an early article on Tannhäuser had drawn a favourable reaction from the composer, he saw Wagner's reliance on dramatics and word-painting as inimical to the nature of music, which he thought is expressive solely by virtue of its form, not through any extra-musical associations. The theoretical framework of Hanslick's criticism is expounded in his book of 1854, Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (On the Musically Beautiful), 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. It is sometimes claimed that Wagner caricatured Hanslick in his opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg as the carping critic Beckmesser (it is said that Wagner originally wanted to name the character Hans Lick). Other targets for Hanslick's heavy criticism were Anton Bruckner and Hugo Wolf.
Hanslick was frequently called "a Jew"; especially by his fanatic enemies among the (anti-Semitic) Wagnerites. Hanslick grew up as a Christian. His mother was from a Jewish family, but converted to Catholicism upon her marriage to his father.
Hanslick was the dedicatee of Brahms' set of waltzes opus 39 for two pianists.
[edit] Literature
- Eduard Hanslick, "Vom Musikalisch-Schönen". Leipzig 1854 (online version)
- Eduard Hanslick, "Geschichte des Konzertwesens in Wien", 2 vol. Vienna 1869-70
- Eduard Hanslick, "Die moderne Oper", 9 vol. Berlin 1875-1900
- Eduard Hanslick, "Aus meinem Leben", 2 vol. Berlin 1894
- Eduard Hanslick, "Suite. Aufsätze über Musik und Musiker". Vienna 1884
- Ambros Wilhelmer, "Der junge Hanslick. Sein 'Intermezzo' in Klagenfurt 1850-1852". Klagenfurt 1959
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