Hanslick, Eduard

(1825–1904)

   One of the most feared music critics of his or any other age, Hanslick was born in Prague. Both a scholar and aesthetic theorist, he became a lecturer in musicology at the University of Vienna in 1856, then professor of music history and aesthetics in 1861. The first person to hold such a position at the institution, he developed what in all likelihood was the first universitylevel course in music appreciation anywhere in the world. In his youth, Hanslick was a vigorous advocate of musical Romanticism and the early operas of Richard Wagner. By 1850, however, he had rejected these views in favor of the musical classicism he associated with the work of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, and in his own day, Johannes Brahms (1833–1897). The ideal score, he argued, consisted of tones set in motion. Composers were inspired not by emotion, but by a kind of inward singing, which arises from the structure of sound. Expression of these relationships could come only through musical composition. For Hanslick, the text of a song had little to do with music itself. Performers could use any text they pleased without changing the effect music had on the hearer.

   Such views set Hanslick at odds with the explicitly programmatic music of the New German School, represented in his day by the mature Wagner, Gustav Mahler, and Anton Bruckner. The vehemence of Hanslick’s reviews so discouraged the hypersensitive Bruckner that he asked Franz Joseph to put an end to such writing. Wagner was a far tougher opponent. The critic argued that the sense of tension that ripples through Wagnerian chromatics comes not from emotional arousal, but merely from auditory experience with disintegrating musical forms. Responding to this and countless other unfavorable evaluations, Wagner based the figure of Veit Beckmesser, the scheming but unimaginative pedant in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, on his perceptions of Hanslick. Indeed, in the earliest sketches of the opera, Beckmesser is called Veit Hanslick.