Rethinking Hanslick: Music, Formalism, and Expression Edited by Nicole Grimes, Siobhán Donovan, and Wolfgang Marx (review)

As the title Rethinking Hanslick promises, this volume offers fourteen studies that mark what Nicole Grimes terms “a paradigm shift” in the reception of the work of Eduard Hanslick (1825–1904) by seeking to “redress the manifold misreadings” that have grown up around it (5). A number of the contributors do focus attention on musical formalism and expression, as the subtitle would suggest; yet surprisingly, much of the most interesting material explores topics not hinted at on the book’s cover, notably cultural politics, gender, ethnicity, and social identity. Taken as a whole, this proves to be a compendium of substantial, well-informed, and rewarding articles that reconsider the significance and value of Hanslick’s writings from a variety of angles.

Influential as both a music critic and an important aesthetician, Hanslick left something of a bifurcated legacy, and this is reflected in Rethinking Hanslick. His major contribution to the field of musical aesthetics is Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, a treatise published in 1854, accepted as his Habilitationsschrift in 1856, and republished in nine updated editions during his lifetime. It has remained a canonical text, widely read up to the present. Vom Musikalisch-Schönen is traditionally deemed a rather conservative declaration of musical ideals opposed to the avant-garde tendencies of the time. Hanslick was thus positioned firmly on one side of an ongoing debate over musical style that continued for the last half of the nineteenth century, a position cemented by Hanslick’s vigorous championing of Brahms in the 1870s and 1880s. On these terms Vom Musikalisch-Schönen was contested from the start, as is well charted in James Deaville’s survey of “Hanslick’s path through musical history.” While some traces of partisanship remain, these disputes have now largely cooled, of course. Following Hanslick’s revilement in the Third Reich, the academic tide swung largely in his favor in the postwar decades, perhaps not surprisingly, as he was himself a most successful academic who shared the historicist, rather conservative liberalism that characterized much of the musical establishment during the Cold War and, in slightly different forms, in the current age of neoliberalism, too.

Articles in the book by Fred Everett Maus, Anthony Pryor, and Felix Wörner discuss Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, demonstrating that critical discussions of Hanslick’s ideas about the aesthetics of musical beauty still have vitality, particularly as they contest one-sided interpretations of his aesthetics as essentially conservative, if not reactionary. Most of the contributors concentrate, however, on Hanslick’s work in Vienna as a music critic, memoirist, and on-the-spot historian, from the 1860s onwards. The rethinking of this side of Hanslick’s work is both more complicated and more unsettled than that of his aesthetics. Readings of late nineteenth-century Viennese art and culture organized around now familiar narratives of the decline of a culture of liberalism and the intertwining ascents of nationalism, collectivism, antisemitism, and various modernisms have prevailed for some two decades. Several articles explore perspectives on Hanslick that have been facilitated by this approach. David Brodbeck’s discussion of Hanslick’s reception of the music of Carl Goldmark and Nicole Grimes’s “German Humanism, Liberalism, and Elegy in Hanslick’s Writings on Brahms,” to take the two best examples, reveal the complexities Hanslick navigated as a standard-setting critic working to align his musical taste, his bourgeois identity, and his aesthetic premises. These essays both effectively regard Hanslick primarily in terms of virtues and conflicts inherent in the culture of the liberal German Bürgertum he inhabited. The related issue of Hanslick’s Jewish identity—an identification he did not embrace, despite his mother’s Jewish birth—is important here as well. Faced with the discomfort that Hanslick felt with what he heard as the “Jewish-Oriental character” in Goldmark’s music, as opposed to an ostensibly...