Eduard Hanslick. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Vienna, 1854. A thirty-year-old jurist on loan to music criticism, Eduard Hanslick, publishes a slim essay with a technical title, Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, On the Musically Beautiful, destined to become the most argued-over book ever written about music. The thesis sits in a formula that has been generating duels for a hundred and seventy years: the content of music is sonic forms in motion. Not feelings, which music cannot represent with precision; not stories, not sunsets, not the composer’s passions. Sounds that move, and the beauty born of their movement, as it is born of arabesques or a kaleidoscope: everything else is what we project onto it.
The book landed in the divided Vienna we know: on one side the Wagnerians and Lisztians, the music of the future, the symphonic poems that tell stories; on the other the party of Brahms, music that stands on form. Hanslick became the general of the second front and, for thirty years, from his column in the Neue Freie Presse, the most powerful critic in Europe. His demolitions of Wagner and Bruckner are anthology pieces of the genre, ferocious, witty and often unjust, and Wagner took his revenge in the most Wagnerian way possible, caricaturing him in the Meistersinger as the pedant Beckmesser. No critic ever received a more durable monument from an enemy.
Reread today, and the facsimile copy sits in the Melos library beside the partisan newspapers of the nineteenth century, the book surprises by how much less arid it is than its reputation. Hanslick does not deny that music moves us: he denies that being moved is its content, and he distinguishes between what music is and what music does. His real polemic is against what he calls pathological listening: the kind that uses music as an emotional bathtub, without listening to anything. And here the old jurist speaks straight to our century, which has made an industry of music as emotional background: mood playlists are exactly the listening Hanslick diagnosed, music reduced to a mood medication, with the form thrown away.
This magazine’s position, readers know it: the audience does not have to understand, it has to let itself be carried away, which in appearance puts us on the side of Hanslick’s enemies. But the contradiction is false, and untangling it is the right way to take leave of this month of reading: letting yourself be carried away by sonic forms in motion is possible, indeed it is the fullest musical experience there is, and it requires no degree. Hanslick defended the object, we defend access: the two battles sit perfectly well in the same magazine. It is with books like these, the ones that prove us wrong in an intelligent way, that a library earns its keep.