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

Rethinking Hanslick: Music, Formalism, and Expression is a significant reassessment of the work of nineteenth-century aesthetician and music critic Eduard Hanslick. A foremost advocate of absolute music and the godfather of musical formalism according to some, Hanslick is historically important chiefly for his 1854 treatise On the Musically Beautiful, in which he argues that music is by nature self-referential and autonomous, and is therefore unsuitable to represent the external world, ideas, and feelings. This philosophical position put him in opposition to Richard Wagner and other members of the New German School, who advocated for programmatic music as the way of the future. Articles in Rethinking Hanslick posit that the traditional scholarly focus on Hanslick’s historical position, based on On the Musically Beautiful alone, neglects his overall contribution as a bourgeois intellectual; as Nicole Grimes points out in the introduction, this results in the framing of his aesthetics with simplistic polarities such as form/expression, absolute/program music, etc. (p. 2). More often than not, Hanslick’s later output as a critic with the Viennese Neue freie Presse, as well as his autobiography, have either been used to explain his arguments in the treatise or omitted altogether. Rethinking Hanslick is a much-needed collection of studies that reevaluate Hanslick’s overall output in a broader cultural context, in particular that of Vienna in the second half of the nineteenth century. While a few articles are needlessly dense and difficult to read, there are several underlying concepts that help to string the articles together and provide assurance to the reader that the authors are on the right investigative paths.

James Deaville’s opening article on Hanslick reception since the publication of On the Musically Beautiful in 1854 (Leipzig: R. Weigel) shows that Hanslick’s work as a whole has been received differently depending on individual agendas (e.g., defamation by the Nazis on the basis of his Jewishness and subsequent voices in defense of him from outside Central Europe). One noteworthy idea the reader may gather from Deaville’s article is that since 1854, the treatise’s polemical tone has never failed to elicit reactions, either positive or negative. As an example of the individual agendas that Deaville discusses, Anthony Pryer’s article on Hanslick’s methodology shows that, while it is true that the treatise does a better job of informing the reader of what music is not rather than what it is (the latter, unfortunately, does not go much beyond the claim that music consists of tonally moving forms), the focus on the negatives relates to the practice of law in Hanslick’s time: contemporaneous legal procedures placed considerable emphasis on showing that the accusations against a defendant were false or insufficient (that is, what it is not ), rather than proving that the defendant was wholly innocent (what it is). After all, as Pryer reminds the reader, Dr. Hanslick was a doctor of law, not music or philosophy.

One prevalent idea in the book is that Hanslick’s inconsistencies are not necessarily a shortcoming, as they are manifestations of his efforts to “reconcile” beauty with logic. Using Otakar Hostinský’s 1877 Das Musikalisch-Schöne und das Gesammtkunstwerk vom Standpuncte der formalen Aesthetik (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel) as a contrasting text, Felix Wörner shows that while Hostinský believes that performance (i.e., the acoustical realization of notation) is crucial in making an aesthetic judgment of a musical work, Hanslick argues that a work is essentially finalized in the score. Fred Everett Maus reminds the reader that Hanslick downplays the significance of embodiment in his treatise to signify the ontological importance of music, and in the process tones down the role of the composer and performance. Yet, as Maus also shows, even as Hanslick argues that music should be contemplated based on its sonic materials...