Eduard Hanslick (1 agos 1825 anni – 1 apr 1904 anni)

Descrizione:

Music Critic and historian, general dick.

In an era of widespread idealistic theorizing, being ahead of one's time was considered an advantage. The myth of the artist-prophet, which Beethoven epitomized, became pervasive. IT still lives. The idea of the artist as prophet was an extension of the value placed on the artist as philosopher. Added to the Romantic emphasis on greatness and the sublime as an increasing regard for innovation and progress. With this, the purpose of music changed. The changes promoted by Brendel, Liszt, and their followers were not universally embraced. In 1888 the great Russian composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky derided the German music of his day, protesting its "detestable pretensions to profundity, strength, and power." In his view it was "all seriousness and nobility of purpose, but the chief thing--beauty--is missing." Indeed, much of the opposition to the New German School came from outside the German-speaking lands. Many foreign musicians understandably were suspicious of the nationalistic designs behind the universalist German pretensions. The opposition's most famous single attack, however, came from the Viennese critic and music historian Eduard Hanslick. In 1854, he authored a tract called Vom musikalisch-Schonen (on the Musically Beautiful) that went through many editions and is still in print. It is difficult today to appreciate the force of its title; but at the time, for a German critic to insist on beauty looked to some like virtual treason.



Hanslick located the beautiful in music not in its ability to convey ideas or meaning, as Brendel did, but in its sheer patterning of sound, that is, in its abstract and absolute character.... Brendel had argued that beginning with Liszt "content creates its own form." The New German position cast feeling and form in opposition; Hanslick's stance melded them. His definition of musical content was Tonend bewegte Form. The New German position cast feeling and form in opposition; Hanslick's stance melded them. His definition of musical content was Tonend bewegte Form--barely translatable as something like "form put in motion by sound" or "sounding form in motion." Although his antagonist tried to brand him a reactionary, Hanslick's ideas were in fact new. By asserting that there were timeless musical values that took precedence over both the intentions of the composer and the reception of the listener, Hanslick and those who shared his views introduced a new faction to what was fast becoming a struggle over the right to define the future of European music, Hanslick would later become a great advocate for Brahms and generally proved a harsh critic of Liszt and Wagner.


Brahms emerged as teh model for the type of music Hanslick advocated for in his aesthetic writings. Another like-minded musician was JOseph JOachim, who was astonishingly frank with Liszt in his letter of resignation from being concertmaster in Weimar. "Your music," wrot the twenty-six-year-old Joachim, "is entirely antagonistic to me; it contradicts everything with which the spritis fo our greats have nourished my mind from my earliest youth. IF it were thinkable that I could ever be deprived of, that I should ever have to renounce, all that I learned to love and honor in their creations, all that I feel music to be, your works would not fill one corner of the vast waste of nothingness that I would feel. How, then, can I feel myself to be united in aim with those who, under the banner of your name and in the belief that they must join forces against the artists for the justification of their contemporaries, make it their life task to propagate your works by every means in their power?"

Joachim looked to the past for the timeless values Hanslick advocated. Mendelssohn and Schumann, Joachim and Brahms were all nurtured in this faith. In the spring of 1860, Joachim drafted a hasty response to BRendel's remarks at the conference when he had christened the New German SChool. Taking offense awt Brendel's smug tone and his brazen snubbing of Schumann, Joachim's open letter denounced the assumption that all "seriously striving musicians" agreed about the value of LIszt's music or about the worthiness of the New German's historicist agenda. On the contrary, Joachim wrote, serious musicians "can only deplore or condemn the productions of the leaders and disciples of the so-called "New German SChool" as contrary to the most frundamental essence of music. " Brahms signed it, but he sort of regretted it later.

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