In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Rethinking Hanslick: Music, Formalism, and Expression ed. by Nicole Grimes, Siobhán Donovan, and Wolfgang Marx
  • Matthew Pritchard
Rethinking Hanslick: Music, Formalism, and Expression. Ed. by Nicole Grimes, Siobhán Donovan, and Wolfgang Marx. pp. xv + 360. Eastman Studies in Music. (University of Rochester Press, Rochester, NY and Boydell & Brewer, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2013. £60. ISBN 978-1-58046-432-1.)

The volume under review developed from contributions presented at the 2009 University College Dublin conference ‘Eduard Hanslick: Aesthetic, Critical, and Cultural Contexts’. In some ways the conference title would have worked better for the published proceedings than the title that was eventually chosen; alternatively, one could well imagine the essays as part of the Princeton series ‘X and his World’ (no critic has yet been given the honour, but the erection of such a musicological ‘statue to a critic’ would be a welcome move away from our preoccupation with composers as the agents of musical culture). As explorations of Hanslick’s contexts, these contributions provide much interesting material, but I have doubts as to whether they really succeed in ‘rethinking’ Hanslick, or giving us new perspectives on the subjects specified in the subtitle. In the final section of this review I will indicate some avenues along which such rethinking might have been—and still could be—pursued.

It would be a truism to say that Hanslick has always been controversial. What is important is the exact nature of the controversy and how it plays into our assessments of both the man and the discipline of musicology that he fostered. Hanslick’s 1854 polemic On the Musically Beautiful [End Page 349] (Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, from here on VMS) has tended, like a magnet, to attract and automatically polarize most of the responses to its author and his work, and it is these sorts of assessments that we need to move beyond if we are to make real progress in understanding Hanslick.

In this respect the present volume is on the whole very helpful. Though one can usually tell where their sympathies ultimately lie, the contributors are determined to tease out the nuances and contradictions in Hanslick’s thought. They are keen to address his criticism, historical work, and memoirs and to counterpoint them with VMS. They generally note that although Hanslick may have laid some of the conceptual foundations of formalism, modernism, and modern musicology, he was not himself a formalist, a modernist, or a modern musicologist. Both Nicole Grimes’s introduction and James Deaville’s ‘Negotiating the Absolute: Hanslick’s Path through Musical History’ (pp. 15–37) give us useful short histories of Hanslick’s reception, noting, as Mark Evan Bonds did at the end of his Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven (Princeton, 2006), pp. 113–14, the part played by Hanslick’s legislations concerning form and content in the musical (and musicological) Cold War, more than a century after VMS was first published.

Yet the overall focus of the volume is, as already mentioned, Hanslick’s own socio-cultural contexts in late nineteenth-century Vienna. Occasionally the context threatens to overwhelm the subject of investigation. One should have no objection to the gender-oriented argument of Marion Gerards’s “‘Faust und Hamlet in einer Person”: The Musical Writings of Eduard Hanslick as Part of the Gender Discourse in the Late Nineteenth Century’ (pp. 212–35) or the similar points made by Nina Noeske in her ‘Body and Soul, Content and Form: On Hanslick’s Use of the Organism Metaphor’ (pp. 236–58), for it is true that ‘Hanslick’s gender-laden music reviews are not just part of the discourse on music, they are also inextricably linked to the contemporary discourse on gender’(p. 227). But the very same points could be made about Schumann’s, Wagner’s, or A. B. Marx’s descriptions of music, and indeed Gerards notes that ‘by comparison with the interpretations of his colleagues Kretzschmar or Kalbeck, Hanslick’s music reviews are certainly less affected by contemporary gender bias’ (p. 226). Less to the extent that Hanslick fights shy, philosophically speaking, of the narrative-hermeneutic mode that he nevertheless cannot banish from his criticism...

pdf

Share