Eduard Hanslick Simulacrum

The Life

Eduard Hanslick was born in Prague in 1825, the son of a civil servant and philosopher of music. He studied law and music at Prague and Vienna, receiving his doctorate in law in 1849, and began writing music criticism while still a student. After a brief civil service career he moved definitively into music journalism, becoming principal music critic of the Wiener Zeitung in 1855 and — from 1864 until nearly his death — of the Neue Freie Presse, the leading Viennese liberal newspaper, whose feuilleton he dominated for almost forty years. In 1861 he was appointed lecturer in music aesthetics and history at the University of Vienna, becoming the first full professor in that subject at a German-speaking university in 1870. He retired in 1895 and died in Vienna in 1904.

His public life was dominated by two alliances and one enmity: a close friendship with Brahms, an aesthetic and personal alignment with the conservative wing of Viennese musical life, and a sustained ideological opposition to Wagner and the New German School of Liszt and Berlioz. Wagner caricatured him as the pedantic town clerk Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger — a portrait Hanslick wore as a badge of honour, pointing out that the work in which Wagner mocked him was, not coincidentally, among Wagner’s most formally satisfying.

The Thought

Hanslick’s philosophical reputation rests on a single book, Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (“On the Musically Beautiful”), first published in 1854 and revised through ten editions over the next half century. Its central claim was formulated in one of the most quoted sentences in the history of musical aesthetics: the content of music is tonend bewegte Formen, tonally moving forms. Music, he argued, has no content outside itself. Its beauty is the beauty of its own forms in their own motion; it does not represent emotions, does not narrate stories, does not point to extra-musical meanings. The widely-held “feelings theory” (Gefühlsästhetik), which identified music’s content with the emotions it aroused, confused an effect of music on listeners with the content of music itself. The same emotion could be aroused by different pieces; different listeners responded with different emotions to the same piece; no specific emotion with its cognitive content could ever be expressed by tones alone. Music, for Hanslick, is like an arabesque in time — a self-sufficient pattern of beauty answerable only to itself.

From this philosophical ground flowed two aesthetic commitments. The first was the primacy of absolute music — instrumental music without text, programme, or extra-musical reference — as the form in which music was most fully itself. Brahms, whom he championed throughout his critical career, was the living proof that the symphony after Beethoven was not exhausted. The second, and the more combative, was his opposition to Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk. The total work of art, in which music served the drama along with text, staging, and visual spectacle, inverted the proper aesthetic hierarchy: music, compelled to illustrate and intensify, could no longer follow its own formal logic. Hanslick was honest about Wagner’s talent — the harmonic invention was extraordinary, the orchestral imagination formidable — but he refused the doctrine under which that talent was deployed, and spent forty years saying so in the pages of Vienna’s leading newspapers.

The Legacy

Vom Musikalisch-Schönen remains one of the founding texts of musical aesthetics as a discipline, and Hanslick’s formalist position — that musical beauty is a property of the musical object rather than of the listener’s response — is still the terrain on which contemporary debates in the philosophy of music are fought. His working criticism, collected in multiple volumes including Die moderne Oper, Aus dem Concertsaal, and Concerte, Componisten und Virtuosen, remains a primary source for the musical life of late-nineteenth-century Vienna and for the contemporary reception of its major composers.

For Schenker, Dahlhaus, Babbitt, and the analytic philosophers of music of the twentieth century, Hanslick is the ancestor whose arguments must be engaged whether one is completing them, historicising them, or trying to refute them. That no subsequent theorist has managed to dispose of the feelings-theory critique is perhaps the most eloquent testimony to the durability of his philosophical achievement.