Tempus

The Critic in Question

Eduard Hanslick and Viennese Musical Identity

Roy Kimmey, Harvard Class of 2009, History Concentrator

Tempus: The Harvard College History Review, Vol. X, Issue 1, Summer 2009.

Tempus 2

On the day when she had first laid the piano arrangements from Tristan und

Isolde on his music stand and begged him to play it for her, he had leapt to his

feet after twenty-five measures and, exhibiting every sign of utmost disgust, be-

gan to pace back and forth between the bay window and the piano. “I won't play

this madam...This is not music, please believe me—and I've always presumed to

know a little something about music. It is pure chaos! It is demagoguery, blas-

phemy and madness!1

On an evening in late November 1862, in the Vienna home of the amateur musician Dr.

Joseph Standthartner, a then obscure Richard Wagner read aloud the poetic libretto of his yet in-

complete opera, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Amidst an audience comprised mostly of his

supporters was one noteworthy exception—the music critic Eduard Hanslick. What happened is

a matter of historical controversy and musical lore. In Wagner’s second prose draft of the li-

bretto, written in October of the previous year, a striking alteration had been made to the list of

dramatis personæ. Crossed out was the name “Sixtus Beckmesser” and in its place was “Viet

Hanslich.” In Wagner’s drama, Beckmesser represents the forces of musical conservativism. He

is cruelly lampooned through the opera, principally in the Third Act, in which he attempts to win

the hand of the beautiful (and distinctly Teutonic) Eva, but fails miserably.2 Whether or not

Wagner read the libretto with this change is unclear. His autobiography insists he did, but the

romanticized narrative of the work draws many such details into question.3 Hanslick’s 1868 re-

view of the Munich première, while overwhelmingly negative, does not suggest a particular en-

mity toward the composer (or his libretto), and would thus seem to contradict Wagner’s claim.4

1 Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family, trans. John Wood (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), p.

488. 2

For a more complete synopsis, history, and analysis of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, see: Robert M. Rayner,

Wagner and Die Meistersinger, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1940).

3 Henry Pleasants III, ed., Vienna’s Golden Years of Music: 1850–1900 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1950), p.

xxii and Stewart Spencer, Wagner Remembered (London: Faber and Faber, 2000), p. 137. Wagner’s account of the

story can be found in: Richard Wagner, My Life, ed. Mary Whittall, trans. Andrew Gay (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1983), pp. 703–704.

4 Hanslick reserves praise for the theatrical elements of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger, particularly the Third Act: “Als

theatralische Vorstellung sind Die Meistersinger eine Sehenswürdigkeit.” (“As a theatrical creation Die Meister-

Tempus 3

Regardless of whether Hanslick heard the libretto with his name inserted, Wagner’s ac-

count of the event illustrates the extent to which the conflict between critic and composer had

reached personal levels. Throughout the latter half of the 19th

century, the Musikerstreit—

“Musicians’ Struggle”—between the Leipzig-based Zukunftsmusiker (“Musicians of the Future”)

led by Richard Wagner and the Vienna-based musical reactionary Johannes Brahms broke the

German-speaking world into divided cultural camps. Both claimed the mantel of Ludwig van

Beethoven.

A label for the musical school that Richard Wagner advocated, the term Zukunftsmusik

was first used in 1854 by a musician and enthusiast of the new style, Professor Leopold Arnold

Zellner, the General Secretary of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (“Society of Musical

Friends”).5 It would quickly find parlance amongst both critics of Wagner and his supporters,

namely, the Hungarian-born, Weimar-based composer and theorist Franz Liszt. By the latter half

of the 1850s, Zukunftsmusik had taken a decidedly pejorative connotation, used frequently by the

critic and editor Ludwig Bischoff in his Niederrhein Musikzeitung.6 The term is drawn from

Wagner's 1849 essay The Artwork of the Future, wherein the composer calls on the Volk—a

community of people who are united in a common desire or want—to cast off the “philistine”

entertainments of Grand Opera and oratorio, and to succumb to their desire for “true art.”7 This

“true art” is creatively synthetic—it employs the painter, poet, architect, and musician to create a

total artwork, the Gesamtkunstwerk.

singer is an object of interest.”). Eduard Hanslick, “Richard Wagner: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,” Gesammel-

te Musikkritiken, Reinhard Ermen and Peter Wapnewski, eds. (Basel: Bärenreiter Kassel, 1989), pp. 77–89.

5 Zellner was a vocal advocate of the music of Weimar-based composer Franz Liszt, who would become one of the

central figures of Zukunftsmusik. See Ben Arnold, The Liszt Companion (West Port, Connecticut: Greenwood Press,

2002), p. 344. 6 Barry Millington, Wagner (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 236.

7 Richard Wagner, The Art-Work of the Future, and Other Works, trans. W. Ashton Ellis (Lincoln, Nebraska:

University of Nebraska Press, 1993), p. 151.

Tempus 4

Wagner's æsthetic philosophy was born in part out of the writings of Arthur Schopen-

hauer and Ludwig Feuerbach. But the way he understood these texts was shaped by a highly per-

sonal interpretation of the works of Ludwig van Beethoven. As understood by Wagner, Beetho-

ven's inclusion of choruses and soloists in the final movement of his Ninth Symphony posed a

fundamental break from the symphonic form, and signaled the death of “absolute” instrumental

music. In the absence of traditional and conventional forms, musical progress demanded dra-

matic shape. Amongst the adherents of the Zukunftsmusik, this would find a variety of expres-

sions, from the Symphonic Poems of Liszt (and later, Richard Strauss), to Anton Bruckner's

planned Te Deum finale of his Ninth Symphony.8 For Wagner, drama is conferred through the

use of the human voice. As he writes, “But still another advance [through the Ninth Symphony]

is to be seen in the path by which Beethoven attained the decisively important ennoblement of

melody; that is, the new significance which vocal music attained in its relations to purely instru-

mental music.”9

Opposing the musical hegemony of the Weimar and Leipzig Zukunftsmusiker was Johan-

nes Brahms in Vienna. Throughout his life, Brahms maintained a fervent distaste for Liszt—as

both a composer and a celebrity—and it was through this antagonism that Brahms found himself

at odds with Wagner. Because he rejected the “Music of the Future” while looking back to tradi-

tional musical forms, Brahms was decried by musical “progressives” as coldly academic, even as

they acknowledged his compositional genius. As the musicologist Michael Musgrave asserts,

“To the growing cleavage between the proponents of a ‘progressive’ philosophy of the relation

of the arts to those who resisted the devaluation of traditional forms already focused on the Leip-

zig school before his appearance, Brahms came to be the inevitable symbol for the conservative

8 An obvious homage to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony; Bruckner died before the completion of his final symphony.

9 Richard Wagner, Beethoven, trans. Albert R. Parsons (Indianapolis: Benham Brothers, 1873), p. 100.

Tempus 5

camp; deeply interested in the past [and] suspicious of verbalizations in music...”10

As with

Wagner, Beethoven provided Brahms with a wellspring of inspiration—but for Brahms, it was

motivic and structural inspiration, rather than theoretical or philosophic. The thematic structuring

of the Fourth Movement of Brahms's Symphony No. 1 is so evocative of his predecessor's style

that when asked by a friend if Beethoven's last symphony was his model, he very famously re-

sponded that “any ass” could see that.11

A few contemporary critics went so far as to declare the

work Beethoven's Tenth, a comment that roused Brahms's ire.

The stakes of the Musikerstreit were higher than prestige. The conflict between the Zu-

kunftsmusiker and Johannes Brahms was ultimately rooted in a question of musical heritage:

would the German-speaking musical capital remain in its traditional home of Vienna, or could it

find a new home within the emerging German Reich? Vienna had a strong claim to the title. Its

musical roster included nearly all figures central to the development of what would become

known as the “German romantic style,” namely Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Joseph Haydn,

Ludwig van Beethoven, and Franz Schubert.12

Coming out of this tradition, it is perhaps less than

surprising that the greatest Viennese composer of the 1860s and 1870s—Johannes Brahms—was

musically conservative, acting as the protector of traditional musical forms. What is surprising is

that Brahms was born in Hamburg, and was culturally Lutheran—an outsider in the devoutly

Catholic Vienna.13

Against Vienna's historically-musical prominence, it is understandable why a

10

Michael Musgrave, The Music of Brahms (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 1. 11

Ibid., p. 134. 12

The musicologist Carl Dahlhaus suggests the existence of a single Classical-Romantic compositional style cen-

tered in Vienna. For a discussion of this topic, see: Carl Dahlhaus, Klassische und romantische Musikästhetik (Laa-

ber: Laaber-Verlag, 1988). 13

Brahms’s religious beliefs are the topic of considerable debate. David Beller-McKenna suggests that while raised

Lutheran, Brahms was essentially non-practicing in his later life. Yet, elements of his religious upbringing shape

many of his compositions, particularly the motets and Ein deutsches Requiem, which both employ text from the Lu-

theran Bible. David Beller-McKenna, Brahms and the German Spirit (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,

2004).

Tempus 6

composer from Saxony would try to define himself as a “Musician of the Future.” And yet, there

can be no future without some kind of past.

Although composers—particularly Wagner—attempted to prove their historical link to

the “First Viennese School” through polemic, the true literary mediator of the conflict was the

music critic. And none stood higher in the 19th

century musical world than the Viennese feuille-

ton writer, Eduard Hanslick. For most of his professional life, Hanslick was an avowed supporter

of Johannes Brahms. Hanslick's sharp-witted ripostes to Liszt and Wagner made him as contro-

versial a writer as he was popular. But however divisive Hanslick may have been while alive, it

was after his death that he rose to the position of archetype—a figure interpreted and reinter-

preted by historian and musicologist alike, a metonym for fin-de-siècle Vienna.

Before the onset of the Second World War, Hanslick became a proxy for attacks on

Brahms’s supporters. Conversely, in post-War Europe, those who criticized Wagner utilized

Hanslick as a historical standard-bearer against the Dionysian, populist Bayreuth-centered cul-

ture that dominated the German-speaking world. In this historical binary—Hanslick as Persecu-

tor versus Hanslick as Hero—every aspect of the critic’s life takes on a semiotic character. His

education, cultural profile, religious background, and of course, his writings, demand continuous

evaluation, shaped by new trends in historical musicology. To one historian, Hanslick’s love of

waltzes indicates a proclivity toward the lowbrow and philistine, a decidedly “Viennese” and

“un-Germanic disposition,” recorded in the “French” literary style of the feuilleton.14

To the

next, this same love of waltzes represents Hanslick’s taste for well-written orchestral music, and

illustrates his assimilation into the musical society of the German-speaking world.15

If Hanslick

indeed serves as an archetype of Vienna, the reevaluation of the critic is per se a reevaluation of

14

This kind of criticism is made most directly in the writings of Max Graf. See: Max Graf, Composer and Critic

(New York: W.W. Norton, 1946). 15

It is in response to critics like Graf that Pleasants III writes Vienna’s Golden Years of Music: 1850–1900.

Tempus 7

the city. By placing the cultural binary surrounding Hanslick into dialogue, it is possible to

evaluate perceptions of Viennese musical identity—and Vienna as whole—in historical musicol-

ogy.

Hanslick proves a fascinating example of the fluidity of identity in mid-century Vienna.

He was born in Prague on September 11, 1825, to a Catholic father who was “an enthusiastic

philosopher and musician of Bohemian peasant stock.”16

His family’s comfortable, middle-class

life was granted through the wealth of his mother, the daughter of a well-to-do Viennese Jewish

merchant family. Hanslick had a content and pleasant childhood (much at odds with the Sturm

und Drang that characterized the adolescences of the musicians with whom he chiefly took issue:

Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner, Bruckner, and Strauss), and “the harmonious circumstances of his emo-

tional and intellectual growth may well have contributed to the development of a rationalistic

point of view at odds with the romantic spirit of the time.”17

Although conservative in his musi-

cal tastes, he was very much a man of his generation, identifying with the music of Schumann

and Brahms. His musical preferences were so singularly modern that he once confessed that “he

would rather see the complete works of Heinrich Schütz destroyed than Brahms’ Ein Deutsches

Requiem, the complete works of Palestrina than Mendelssohn’s, all the concertos and sonatas of

Bach than the quartets of Schumann and Brahms, and all of Gluck than Don Giovanni, Fidelio,

or Der Freischütz.”18

Hanslick’s education was thoroughly Bohemian, influenced by the emergent nationalistic

idioms of Czech art, music, and literature. Even so, the Prague artistic scene was remarkably

conservative. (When the “programmatic” composer Hector Berlioz performed in the city in 1846,

16

Henry Pleasants III, ed., Vienna’s Golden Years of Music: 1850–1900, p. 1. 17

Ibid. 18

Ibid., p. 2. It is interesting to note that while Brahms was considered a musical conservative, Hanslick neverthe-

less regarded him as “modern.”

Tempus 8

his music proved so controversial that debates raged in coffee houses across the city as to

whether his works could be considered music at all.19

) At the age of 18, Hanslick was sent to the

prominent Czech composer and pedagogue Jan Tomásek for instruction on the piano, centered

on a curriculum of theory, harmony, counterpoint, fugue, instrumentation, and experimental

composition. After a severe and particularly rigorous four-year instruction (Tomásek required the

young Hanslick to memorize a full Baroque work—often a Bach prelude and fugue—weekly),

Hanslick was faced with the difficult decision of whether or not to pursue a career as a musician.

Although encouraged by both Tomásek and his father to do so, Hanslick was in many ways too

much a man of convention for the concert hall. The most attractive calling for a 19th

century Vi-

ennese intellectual was law; abandoning music, he enrolled that year in the University of Prague.

His time at the University was as musically productive as it was academic. Independ-

ently, Hanslick devoted himself to a rigorous study of musical history and æsthetics. He also be-

came acquainted with Robert Schumann’s Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. Printed in Leipzig, the

Neue Zeitschrift brought Hanslick news of Chopin, Mendelssohn, and Berlioz. His first commis-

sions as music critic also came at this time. Rudolf Glaser, publisher of the intellectual journal

Ost und West, offered Hanslick the position of music critic (upon the recommendation of a mu-

tual friend). Dominating the Prague musical scene was Friedrich Kittl, a young and ambitious

conductor and director of the Conservatory of Music. Hanslick was so moved by Kittl’s per-

formance of Schumann’s Das Paradeis und die Peri that he wrote a long article on the work for

Ost und West. The review reached Schumann, who invited Hanslick to visit him in Dresden.

In 1846, while traveling to Dresden at Schumann’s request, he made the acquaintance of

Wagner. After seeing a performance of Tannhäuser, he immediately became a supporter of the

19

Geoffrey Payzant, Eduard Hanslick and Hector Berlioz in Prague: A Documentary Narrative (Calgary: Univer-

sity of Calgary Press, 1991). Payzant suggests that Hanslick’s formalistic understanding of music could be traced to

his encounters with Berlioz in 1846.

Tempus 9

composer, stating in one of his earliest musical reviews that “If there is anyone among contem-

porary German composers from whom we can expect something distinguished in the field of se-

rious grand opera, it is [Wagner]. Richard Wagner is, I am convinced, the greatest dramatic tal-

ent among all contemporary composers.”20

Upon returning from Dresden, Hanslick took up resi-

dency in Vienna, the city that would become his life-long home.21

Hanslick arrived in Vienna just two years before the March Revolution. The transforma-

tion of the city’s culture after 1848 is a topic he reflected on late in his life:

It has always been a valuable memory to me to have experienced the last years of pre-March Vi-

enna. How trivial was public musical life at the end of the thirties and in the early forties! Sump-

tuous and trivial alike, it vacillated between dull sentimentality and scintillant wit…Musical life

was dominated by Italian opera, virtuosity, and the waltz. I would be the last to underestimate the

talent of [Johann Strauss I and Joseph Franz Karl Lanner22

]…but it can readily be understood

that this sweetly intoxicating three-quarter time, to which heads as well as feet were abandoned,

combined with Italian opera and the cult of virtuosity, rendered listeners steadily less capable of

intellectual effort.23

Hanslick here characterizes Vienna as a city suffused with decadent imperial and Italian

entertainments. This would change with the Viennese Revolution. It is ultimately Hanslick’s ar-

gument that the history of concert life in Vienna paralleled the trajectory of political order in the

empire: “a gradual yet unstoppable evolution from absolute rule by monarchical authorities to

the ‘democratization’ of society, politics, and artistic and musical life.”24

Vienna experienced a

20

Eduard Hanslick, “Tannhäuser,” in Vienna’s Golden Years of Music: 1850–1900, ed. Henry Pleasants III, p. 23. 21

Ibid., pp. 4–6. 22

Strauss I and Lanner are often credited as the founders of Viennese dance music. 23

Eduard Hanslick, Aus meinem Leben von Eduard Hanslick: Band I (Berlin: Allgemeiner Verein für Deutsche Lit-

teratur, 1894), pp. 120–160 in ibid., p. 7. 24

Kevin C. Karnes, Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History: Shaping Modern Musical Thought in Late Nine-

teenth-Century Vienna (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 54.

Tempus 10

turning away from the artistic luxuries of the epic, virtuosic transcriptions of Liszt, and in their

place, found a new love of the “thoughtful” formalistic virtuosity of Bach, Scarlatti and Handel.

Organizationally, the post-March period observed a rise in musical foundations such as the Ge-

sellschaft der Musikfreunde, led by specialist musicians rather than “the philistine representatives

of ‘organized dilettantism’ who had constituted the ‘ruling power in the vormärzliche concert

life.’”25

Throughout the forties and fifties, Hanslick dedicated himself to both the practice of law

and his musical writings. In 1852, he was transferred in the public’s service from the Ministry of

Finance to the University Department of the Ministry of Education. This move granted Hanslick

ample time to pursue music criticism, and he began publishing twice weekly in the feuilleton of

Die Presse in 1855. In 1856, after the publication of his treatise Vom Musikalich-Schönen (On

the Musically Beautiful), Hanslick was granted a lectureship at the University of Vienna, a posi-

tion he would hold for nearly forty years.

Further æsthetic study led him to a revision of his previous theories on Wagnerian opera,

particularly after discussion with his friend and amateur musician, Professor Theodor Billroth.

Billroth, a disciple of Johannes Brahms, had a particularly close relationship with the com-

poser—almost all of Brahms’s chamber works received their premières privately in the sitting

room of Billroth’s apartment. By 1858, Hanslick’s review of Lohengrin demonstrates the critic’s

contempt for Wagner’s compositional style, going so far as to say that it has not progressed be-

yond Beethoven: “Is there in the whole of Lohengrin a single number which quickens the lis-

tener’s heartbeat as does the trio or the quartet in prison [from Fidelio]? Has Wagner, with his

declamatory apparatus, ever awakened the pulse of life as Beethoven did with his purely musical

25

Eduard Hanslick, Geschichte des Concertwesens in Wien (Vienna: Willhelm Braumüller, 1869, p. 384), in ibid.,

p. 56.

Tempus 11

materials?”26

Despite dispatching the artistic forces of the Gesamtkunstwerk, Hanslick argues

that Wagner fails to progress past Beethoven’s orchestra music—an unmistakable rejection of

Zukunftsmusik. Wagner was enraged by this betrayal. In the 1869 reprint of his notorious essay

“On Judaism in Music,” Wagner includes an addendum that attacks “Hanslick’s gracefully hid-

den Jewish origins,” and further denounces all Jewish influences on Germanic musical output.27

Hanslick’s personal journals indicate that he was unconcerned with Wagner’s attacks.28

The bat-

tle lines had already been drawn. For the next thirty years, Vienna would find a no more vocal

advocate of Brahms than Hanslick.

Hanslick’s biography illustrates the conflicting labels that can all be rightly applied to

him: Jew and Catholic, Czech and German, Praguer and Viennese, public servant and intellec-

tual. These oppositional identities have permitted historians throughout the past century to pre-

sent Hanslick as an archetype of Vienna, a city defined by its multiethnic and multicultural char-

acter. The extent to which Hanslick represents Viennese diversity is illustrated through an

evaluation of three identity spectra, proposed by Michael Steinberg in his essay, “Jewish Identity

and Intellectuality in Fin-de-Siècle Austria: Suggestions for a Historical Discourse.”29

The first

spectrum is a religious one—ranging from the most integrated religious group (Catholicism) to

the least (Judaism).30

By virtue of his father’s religious background, Hanslick enjoyed the full

benefits of the Viennese Catholic identity, and held governmental positions and employment

usually designated exclusively for the non-Jewish. His friends included anti-Semites such as Dr.

26

Eduard Hanslick, “Lohengrin,” in Vienna’s Golden Years of Music: 1850–1900, ed. Henry Pleasants III, p. 57. 27

Milton E. Brener, Richard Wagner and the Jews (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Co., 2006), p. 95. 28

Henry Pleasants III, ed., Vienna’s Golden Years of Music: 1850–1900, p. xxii. 29

Michael P. Steinberg, “Jewish Identity and Intellectuality in Fin-de-Siècle Austria: Suggestions for a Historical

Discourse,” New German Critique, No. 43, Special Issue on Austria (1988): 3–33. 30

Steinberg fails to address the position of Viennese Muslims in this spectrum, who would most certainly be the

least integrated along the religious spectrum. The historian Steven Beller would argue that Jews were actually so

dominant in the artistic life of Vienna, that to label them as “less integrated” is misleading. For a full discussion of

this topic, see: Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 1867–1938, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Tempus 12

Theodor Billroth.31

The second spectrum is that between the progressive and the conservative.

Wagner had situated himself as the “Musician of the Future” and his polemics reveal an intellec-

tual support of populist politics in the Volk. Conversely, to support Brahms was a retreat to the

past—an acceptance of formalism and conservative politics. Hanslick traversed this spectrum

through his lifetime. He observed Vienna moving through this spectrum too, albeit in the oppo-

site direction; Wagner gained greater support in the imperial capital as the politics of the city

moved in a democratized direction. The third spectrum is of cultural identity. Although Hanslick

may have been born in Bohemia, history has cast him as the model (or stereotypical) Viennese,

suggesting the centrality of incorporation and assimilation to Vienna’s character. Historians have

juxtaposed these various spectra in order to construct an image of Hanslick, and thus describe

fin-de-siècle Vienna and its position within the German-speaking musical world. And yet, de-

spite this attention to identity, few have evaluated Hanslick’s criticisms on their own merits. An

examination of such materials helps illuminate his æsthetics and personal preferences, and pro-

vides a basis for the assessment of historiographic models of the critic and his city.

The musical-politics of his criticism aside, Hanslick remains an important figure in musi-

cology if only for his contribution to the establishment of music criticism as a literary field. His

writings demonstrate a radical transformation in the understanding of musical thought and æs-

thetics. Their popular circulation and readership pushed this discourse beyond the walls of aca-

demia. The musicologist Kevin Karnes echoes the late 19th

century philosopher Robert Zimmer-

mann who described Hanslick’s seminal On the Musically Beautiful (1854) as “Epoch-

31

In the early 1870s, Dr. Theodor Billroth published a volume on the instruction of medicine at the Viennese Medi-

cal School, in which he openly challenges the University for accepting Hungarian and Galician Jews. See: Dennis

Klein, Jewish Origins of the Psychoanalytic Movement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 50.

Tempus 13

making.”32

Karnes writes that the work was “the first such book to suggest that neither the lan-

guage nor the arguments of metaphysics can account for music’s meaning and beauty. In the cen-

tury and a half that has followed its publication, the arguments advanced in Hanslick’s book have

been widely regarded as constituting the writer’s definitive contribution to the discipline.”33

His

analytical method eschewed the ekphrastic, emotive prose-style popular in his day and aspired to

a degree of scientific rigor, which he believed had already found a footing in the criticism of the

visual and literary arts. That On the Musically Beautiful even suggests a methodological ap-

proach indicates the extent to which Hanslick was breaking from previous æsthetic modes, prin-

cipally, the 19th century notion of beauty as an inherent justifying purpose. By proposing a criti-

cal judgment to music, he evoked Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790), which argued

that the experience of beauty was purposive, and yet without definite purpose.34

In other words,

music should affect the listener as though it had meaning, even if one cannot be rationally found.

Hanslick draws a distinction between emotion and perception, and introduces sensory

awareness as a means by which music can be understood. Physiology forms a part of this analy-

sis, but his goal is not to delineate a wholly physical means of understanding. Hanslick contends

that music does indeed arouse “feelings” but posits that it is where these “feelings” come from

that is æsthetically relevant: “from particular patterns within the music and not by some alchemy

directly from the soul of the composer.”35

As he states, “The greatest obstacle to a scientific de-

velopment of musical æsthetics has been the undue prominence given to the action of music on

our feelings. The more violent this action is, the louder is it praised as evidence of musical

32

Robert Zimmerman, Eduard Hanslick: Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (Leipzig: Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissen-

schaft I, 1885), p. 251 in Kevin C. Karnes, Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History: Shaping Modern Musical

Thought in Late Nineteenth-Century Vienna (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 21. 33

Ibid. 34

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J.H. Bernard (New York: Hafner Press, 1951), p. xvii. 35

Source Readings in Music History, William Oliver Strunk and Leo Treitler, eds. (New York: W.W. Norton,

1998), p. 120.

Tempus 14

beauty.”36

Karnes suggests that Hanslick’s desire for an empirical evaluation was related to the

19th

century rise of the chemist, physicist, physician, and biologist and the comparative decline

of the philosopher.37

While although the term Wissenschaft is understood to include the humanis-

tic disciplines, “anybody stressing the word Wissenschaft in the second half of the nineteenth

century wishes to underline the link between the humanities and the exact sciences and to draw

attention to the application of the scientific method, however loosely defined, to the fields of phi-

losophy and history.”38

To read Hanslick’s criticism reveals not only a greater attention to the “science” of the

literary form, but also a heightened awareness of the social environment in which the music ex-

isted. The musicologist Marc Weiner focuses upon this aspect of musical literature in his Under-

tones of Insurrection: Music, Politics, and the Social Sphere in the Modern German Narrative,

and suggests a means by which the reader can understand such writings through semiotic dis-

course: “Music, of course, has always operated within a socially determined semiotic system,

and the associative configurations in which it was perceived…were always representative of

given historical moments.”39

The question to the historian, then, is how music functions as code

for sociopolitical pressures. Weiner suggests that “in discussing the status of music as a social

sign [one area of consideration is] the development of a discourse on music in such nonmusical,

verbal genres as music criticism, æsthetic debates, and popular literature, that operates as a sec-

ondary code reflecting the social function of the art.”40

Criticism constitutes itself through ex-

plicit linkages to such social functions. For example, although the organist Herr Pfühl may de-

36

Edward Hanslick, The Beautiful in Music: A Contribution to the Revisal of Musical Æsthetics, trans. Gustav

Cohen (New York: Da Capo Press, 1974), p. 123. 37

Kevin C. Karnes, Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History, p. 9. 38

Music in European Thought, 1851–1912, ed. Bojan Bujic, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988),

p. 305. 39

Marc A. Weiner, Undertones of Insurrection: Music, Politics, and the Social Sphere in the Modern German Nar-

rative (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), pp. 6–7. 40

Ibid., p. 7.

Tempus 15

clare Wagner’s music blasphemous, demagogue-like, or mad in Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks,

there is nothing intrinsic about the music to suggest this. Rather, the author is drawing upon cul-

tural suppositions about both the organist and Wagner—suppositions that the critic semiotically

links to the music.

Thus, from the perspective of structuralism, music may act as a signifier, but the critic

must elucidate that which is signified. Claude Lévi-Strauss’s writings on art in The Savage Mind

help clarify this. “Art lies half-way between scientific knowledge and mythical or magical

thought. It is common knowledge that the artist is both something of a scientist [by creating

means and results through events and experiments] and of a bricoleur [by building up structures

of meaning by fitting together events].”41

That is to say, it is unclear if the artist acts as an inter-

locutor through the work—Lévi-Strauss contends that this can only be accomplished partially.42

In music, Weiner suggests that the critic completes the relation of the signified to the signifier;

this is the process of bricolage. Although Hanslick may have contended that his model of criti-

cism represented a “scientific” study, in the language of semiotics he rather acts as bricoleur.43

What musical-social associations, then, was Hanslick advancing? Hanslick’s critique of

Die Meistersinger provides a useful example of how the language of criticism can signify cul-

tural meaning. Commenting on the finale of the Second Act, Hanslick states that “Nothing, noth-

ing at all, is discernible of subtle musical disposition; one hears nothing but brutal shouting and

screaming.”44

Hanslick is describing the onstage conflict that breaks out amongst the mastersing-

41

Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), p. 22. 42

Ibid., p. 29. 43

Ironically, Wagner, as composer-polemicist, would function as “scientist” in the structuralist model. His essays

prepared an intellectual landscape for his premières, thus facilitating his role as interlocutor for his own work. And

as his polemics suggest, his intent is to manipulate the event of musical drama to achieve a result—the emancipation

of the Volk-mind. Hanslick inadvertently touches upon this by referring to Die Meistersinger as a “musical experi-

ment.” See Eduard Hanslick, “Die Meistersinger,” Vienna’s Golden Years of Music: 1850–1900, ed. Henry Pleas-

ants III, p. 130. 44

Ibid., p. 121.

Tempus 16

ers. Hanslick frames the onstage event as a riot by signifying particular violence in the action;

what transpires is not music, but rather shouting and screaming. By the time Hanslick published

his review of Die Meistersinger, it had almost become customary for critics of Wagner to de-

scribe one of his onstage scenes as a riot. Such language is particularly charged because Wagner

had been faced with actual riots in his audiences. In 1861, when Wagner arrived in Paris with his

new production of Tannhäuser, the third performance of the work was crippled with uproars in

the audience, some lasting as long as fifteen minutes.45

Hanslick’s characterization of Wagner’s

staging as a riot suggests that a madness is acting out diegetically—a madness that the contem-

porary reader knew could find its way into the audience, or even into the Viennese streets, as it

had little over a decade earlier, in 1848. The root of this madness is the formlessness of the musi-

cal drama, which places the listener under a drug-like spell. “[Die Meistersinger] consists of the

intentional dissolution of every fixed form into shapeless, sensually intoxicating resonance; the

replacement of independent, articulate melody by vague melodization. One may confidently use

Wagner’s dry technical expression, ‘infinite melody,’ since everyone knows by now what is

meant.”46

This theme would find repetition in the writings of many fin-de-siècle modernist writ-

ers, such as Ferdinand von Saar’s Geschichte eines Wiener Kindes (“Tale of a Viennese Child”),

which depicts the adulterous behavior of the protagonist Else, a young woman too easily influ-

enced by the perilous music of Richard Wagner.47

Because of his cosmopolitan background and the contentious tone of his criticism,

Hanslick’s life and writings are especially well suited to semiotic interpretation. Throughout the

last century, musicologists and historians have manipulated the complexities of Hanslick’s iden-

tity in order to advance polemical claims regarding the Viennese musical legacy. When the pro-

45

Barry Millington, Wagner, p. 281. 46

Ibid., p. 127. 47

Marc A. Weiner, Undertones of Insurrection, p. 13.

Tempus 17

Wagnerite faction rose to the cultural majority in the first third of the 20th century, musicologists

such as Max Graf attacked Hanslick as a critic engrossed in the leisurely lifestyle of Vienna, and

dismissed his criticism as overly concerned with the sensuous and facile.48

Hanslick’s cultural

identity is of particular interest to Graf, who misleadingly labels him “Slavic by birth.”49

Draw-

ing upon the cultural stereotype of the morose Slav, Graf expresses surprise at how thoroughly

Hanslick was integrated in “the careless, pleasure-seeking, brilliant, and elegant society of Vi-

enna…”50

Graf contends that Hanslick’s criticism is similarly integrated with popular opinions of

Vienna, arguing that he is “the type of critic who is the reader’s mouthpiece.”51

Ignoring

Hanslick’s contributions to a new understanding of musical æsthetics, Graf counters that

Hanslick’s literary output was popular with his Viennese readership because it echoed their

tastes exactly. Such a description is wholly at odds with Hanslick’s own descriptions of his posi-

tion in the Viennese musical scene. Rather than the mouthpiece of the masses, he felt himself

fighting against his Neue Freie Presse readership: “The consciousness of being in the minority

embitters the most honest soul and sharpens the vocabulary. I readily confess that in my case this

may have happened…”52

It can be difficult to discern where Graf’s description of Hanslick ends and his descrip-

tion of Vienna begins. The extent to which Graf holds Hanslick as the archetype of the city is

remarkable—“he and he alone was the real representative of the taste of Viennese society.”53

48 In many ways, such attacks were part of a larger German-nationalist criticism of Austria, best captured by a quote

from Otto van Bismark’s 1859 speech advocating Prussian involvement against the empire in the Second War of

Italian Independence: “…the Slavic-Romanian half-breed state on the Danube, whoring with pope and emperor…”

See: James J. Sheehan, German History: 1770–1866 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 865. 49

Max Graf, Composer and Critic, p. 246. 50

Ibid., pp. 246–247. 51

Ibid., pp. 242. 52

Eduard Hanslick, Aus Meinem Leben in Vienna’s Golden Years of Music: 1850-1900, p. XX. Graf’s analysis of

Brahms in Vienna inadvertently supports this claim. 53

Max Graf, Composer and Critic, p. 249.

Tempus 18

The intent of his criticism is clear: to eliminate Vienna’s claim as the German-speaking musical

capital by linking the city with non-Germanic music forms—specifically, Italian opera—and the

lowbrow waltz. There is no sense of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, or Schubert in Graf’s Vienna.

Brahms is similarly dismissed. Graf suggests that the composer had little effect on the musical

landscape of the city, asserting that “he was the typical Protestant from northern Germany, at-

tracted by the sensuousness and ease of Vienna, like a serious man falling in love with a light-

minded and perpetually smiling woman…when Brahms produced his earliest works there, the

Viennese public would have none of their dark and passionate romanticism.”54

Vienna is thus

divorced from the true Germanic musical and cultural identity. To Graf, Vienna’s predilection

for légèreté and ease bears more in common with Paris or Venice than Leipzig or Dresden.

The most unsettling aspect of Graf’s history is the degree to which anti-Semitic imagery perme-

ates his physical descriptions of the critic. Graf, a one-time pupil of Hanslick, describes him in

this fashion:

Beside the reading desk was an old upright piano, on which Hanslick used to play exam-

ples to illustrate his lectures, with short, round fingers in a somewhat old-fashioned way.

He was already an old man—short, with a bent back and white hair and pointed beard.

With a sharp nose under bushy eyebrows, he looked like an elderly hawk. I was disap-

pointed when he spread his manuscript on the desk and began to read it in a feminine, fal-

setto voice, without looking up.55

Written in 1946, the reader would immediately have understood the significance of Graf’s refer-

ence to Hanslick’s nose and eyebrows. By the mid-19th

century, the term “hawk” had become a

common descriptor for Jewish physiognomies, particularly amongst practitioners of pseudo-

54

Ibid., p. 247. 55

Ibid., pp. 244–245.

Tempus 19

sciences such as “nasology.” The British nasologist George Jabet sums up the anti-Semitic

stereotypes associated with this facial feature. “[The Jewish, or Hawk Nose] is a good, useful,

practical Nose, very able to carry its owner successfully through the world, that is as success is

now-a-days measured, by weight of purse; nevertheless it will not elevate him to any very ex-

alted pitch of intellectuality.”56

This stereotype is one that Graf seems to be evoking directly:

Hanslick himself lacks the intellectuality necessary to understand Wagner, and actively sup-

presses this in his readers. Graf cynically describes Hanslick’s writings as “twelve volumes, in

which his intelligence, charm, clarity, and wit are persevered, like drugs and poisons, in cut-glass

vessels on the shelves of a pharmacy.”57

Graf’s anti-Semitism seems paradoxical—he himself was a Jew who fled Nazi oppres-

sion, immigrating to the United States in 1938. Building upon Carl Schorske’s Fin-de-Siècle Vi-

enna, the historian William McGrath suggests that Jewish anti-Semitism in late 19th

century Vi-

enna was related to the failures of liberalism in the previous generation. Focusing upon the pre-

dominately Jewish intellectual “Pernerstorfer Circle,” named after the socialist delegation leader

in the lower house of the Reichsrat, Engelbert Pernerstorfer, McGrath argues that this younger

generation “felt the urge to break with the bourgeois world and, to resuscitate a culture that had

lost its vitality.”58

For some, this “revolt against society, parents and school swelled into a revolt

against the bourgeois age.”59

Because of the close relationship between Jews and liberalism in

the 1850s and 1860s, young Viennese Jews of the 1870s turned to völkisch popular politics as an

alternate means of assimilation. A significant part of Austrian völkisch politics was an anti-

Semitic outlook, one that many young Jews adopted with particular fervor. As McGrath summa-

56

George Jabet, Nasology: Or, Hints Towards a Classification of Noses (London: Richard Bentley, 1848), p. 154. 57

Max Graf, Composer and Critic, pp. 244. 58

McGrath is citing the German-born, Jewish-American historian George Mosse (1918-1999). William J. McGrath,

Dionysian Art and Populist Politics in Austria (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), p. 5. 59

George Mosse, “The Influence of the Völkisch Idea on German Jewry,” Studies of the Leo Baeck Institute (New

York: Leo Baeck Institute, 1967), pp. 84–86.

Tempus 20

rizes, “Whether or not they were in some sense trying to prove the authenticity of their own

Germanness in this way remains difficult to say, but certainly many of their criticisms of liberal

failures seem to reflect the longing for a community and acceptance appropriate to their Jewish

assimilationist background.”60

Steven Beller’s Vienna and the Jews, 1867—1938 places musi-

cians like Max Graf within an entire trend of assimilationist Jews who turned to Wagner as a

means of proving their German identities. “Guido Adler [a central figure in the Pernerstorfer

Circle] was one of the first Viennese Wagnerians and a founder of the Akademischer

Wagnerverein. The first composer in Vienna to emulate Wagner was a Jew, Karl Goldmark.”61

To this list, one could easily add Max Graf. His attacks on Hanslick can be understood to func-

tion as attacks on Viennese liberalism.

McGrath contributes to a second analytical model of Hanslick, shaped by the post-

Second World War decline of Wagner and the subsequent rise of Arnold Schönberg’s “Second

Viennese School” into critical awareness and musicological acceptance. Historians of this camp

depict a very different Hanslick—one who prefigured Friedrich Nietzsche’s attacks on the Di-

onysian collapse of late Wagner into “chaos in place of rhythm,” music written to impress on

“the masses! the immature! the used up! the morbid! the idiots! the Wagnerians!”62

Volkisch

populism found support amongst Wagner’s audiences and the composer grew in popularity as

liberalism collapsed in 1870s Vienna. The result was a populist politics in a “new key,” embod-

ied in the virulently anti-Semitic politicians Georg Ritter von Schönerer and Karl Lueger. Per-

haps the musicologist could identify this new key as “A minor,” the starting key of Wagner’s

Tristan und Isolde, the musical drama that would solidify his dominance of the Germanic oper-

60

William J. McGrath, Dionysian Art and Populist Politics in Austria, p. 6. 61

Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 1867–1938, p. 157. 62

Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche Contra Wagner in The Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Vol. XI, trans. Thomas

Common (London: MacMillan & Co. Ltd., 1896), pp. 68–69.

Tempus 21

atic stage.63

In this narrative, Hanslick assumes the role of Apollonian hero, favoring the “aca-

demic” and “rational” Brahms and fighting against the Wagnerian cult, one that took on a relig-

ious character as Wagner himself espoused a new pan-Germanic spirituality unifying “Schopen-

hauerian philosophy, musical theory, and Christian mysticism.”64

Following World War II, the music of Viennese serialist composer Arnold Schönberg

and his “Second Vienesse School”—comprised of Alban Berg and Anton Webern—found new

and accepting audiences amongst musicians and musicologists centered at the University of

Darmstadt. Interestingly, Schönberg’s æsthetic awakening parallels that of Hanslick. Initially a

devout Wagnerian, Schönberg’s study of the works of Johannes Brahms led the composer to

completely reevaluate his compositional language. Eschewing the harmonic pallet of Wagner

and Richard Strauss, Schönberg embraced a theoretically new atonal musical idiom, rooted in the

formalist structures and contrapuntal syntax of Brahms.65

Through his defense of Brahms,

Hanslick’s criticism forms part of the intellectual link from Beethoven to Brahms to Schönberg.

This is countered by a third analysis of Hanslick, related to a late-1970s and 1980s interest in the

Jewish intellectual community of fin-de-siècle Vienna. As argued by the Peter Gay in his Freud,

Jews and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture, Hanslick may have lived

in the imperial lands for his entire life, but his identity was distinctly un-Austrian. A champion of

the Protestant Brahms, Hanslick’s readership and influence was as great in Berlin as it was in

Vienna. He thus contributed as much to the shaping of a Germanic musical identity as he did to

an Austrian or Viennese one. His military allegiances often fell with the Prussians, even when

rivaling Austria. He welcomed the victories of the Prussian Army in 1870–1871, “as though he

63

Carl E. Schorske, “Politics in a New Key: An Austrian Triptych,” Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture

(New York: Vintage Books, 1981), pp. 116–180. 64

William J. McGrath, Dionysian Art and Populist Politics in Austria, p. 89. 65

For a look at Schönberg’s academic treatment of Brahms’s music, see: Arnold Schönberg, “Brahms the Progres-

sive,” Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schönberg, ed. Leonard Stein, trans. Leo Black (Berkeley: Uni-

versity of California Press, 1984), pp. 398–441.

Tempus 22

came from a Junker house.”66

Furthermore, his associations with noted anti-Semites such as Pro-

fessor Billroth suggests an un-Jewish character. Indeed, there is no evidence to show that

Hanslick was ever a practicing Jew.

Gay contends that Hanslick does not represent the conservative antithesis to Wagner’s

Zukunftsmusik, but rather a member of an opposing modernist æsthetic school. Hanslick’s mod-

ernism differed from Wagner in that he still accepted a place for formal structures, and rejected a

complete sensual collapse into irrational harmonic language. As Gay states, “Form—this is the

meaning of Vom Musikalish-Schönen and the uncounted articles that accompany Hanslick’s trea-

tise like so many grace notes—form has pleasures and, indeed, profundities of its own.”67

If

Hanslick is seen today as a musical conservative, it is Wagner’s doing. By portraying Hanslick

as Beckmesser, the critic has fallen into his current musicological caricature.

Efforts made by historians and musicologists over the past century to understand the mu-

sic critic Eduard Hanslick have been uniformly problematic. This is ultimately the result of intel-

lectual strategy—indeed, the goal seems less to unravel Hanslick than to utilize the critic as an

archetype of the fin-de-siècle Viennese bourgeoisie. His biography and criticism help elucidate

the places where each analytic model fails. Hanslick’s education under the conservative musician

Tomásek imbued the critic with a strong sense of formal rigor. Even after explorations in a wide

array of æsthetic philosophies, Hanslick suggests in his On the Musically Beautiful that it is form

that conveys beauty to the listener and renders music coherent, rather than an indefinable ele-

ment of “feeling.” Early 20th

century music critics such as Max Graf, attempting to claim Vienna

under a Germanic musical banner, actively ignored Hanslick’s biography and criticisms. Rather

66

Peter Gay, Freud, Jews and Other Germans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 12–13. 67

Ibid., 276-277.

Tempus 23

than assess the aspects of his personal background with which he identified, Graf selects traits

that support his thesis: Hanslick as effete anti-intellectual. After World War II, when forging a

unique Austrian identity became a matter of national importance, Hanslick’s criticisms provided

a literary link between Beethoven and Brahms. Arnold Schönberg’s admiration and imitation of

Brahms restored the historical Viennese musical connection and heritage from past to present,

positioning it once again as the capital of the German-speaking world. Despite more contempo-

rary efforts to evaluate Hanslick as a modernist—particularly, by Peter Gay—the shadow of

Wagner’s “Viet Hanslich” still looms large. Perhaps this fragmentation of Hanslick is unavoid-

able. As he embodies a union of so many distinct elements of the complex social and cultural

fabric of fin-de-siècle Vienna, he will remain a compelling case study for the historian and musi-

cologist—ready for reevaluation.

Tempus 24

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Tempus 25

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