Concept
Eduard Hanslick
Overview
Eduard Hanslick (11 September 1825 – 6 August 1904) was an Austrian music critic, aesthetician and historian. 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.
Hanslick was a conservative critic and championed absolute music over programmatic music for much of his career. 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.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
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It must be original, exuberant, and tender, and like a dainty, soft woman in roguishness and grace ... I shall never admit that a German _can_ understand what music is. Those musicians who are called German, the greatest and most famous foremost, are all foreigners, either Slavs, Croats, Italians, Dutchmen--or Jews; or else, like Heinrich Schütz, Bach, and Händel, they are Germans of a strong race which is now…
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Ecce Homo Complete Works, Volume Seventeen
States what Eduard Hanslick is.
Again, in the essential nature of harmony and rhythm there is no difficulty in discerning love which has not yet become double. But when you want to use them in actual life, either in the composition of songs or in the correct performance of airs or metres composed already, which latter is called education, then the difficulty begins, and the good artist is needed. Then the old tale has to be repeated of fair and…
Plato, Symposium
States what Eduard Hanslick is.
That brutality and most delicate weakness which exist side by side, that running wild of natural instincts, and nervous hyper-sensitiveness, that thirst for emotion which arises from fatigue and the love of fatigue.—All this is understood by the Wagnerites. _Stupefaction or intoxication_ constitute all Wagnerian art. On the other hand I could mention instances in which Wagner stands _higher_, in which real joy flows…
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms.
States what Eduard Hanslick is.
Related ideas
Place in the tradition
Part of Aesthetics.