Knowra Eduard Hanslick Eduard Hanslick Eduard Hanslick (1825–1904) was an Austrian music critic and theorist whose formalist aesthetics located music’s beauty in its patterned, moving sounds rather than expressed feelings.
Vom Musikalisch-Schönen : Eduard Hanslick’s 1854 treatise arguing that music’s beauty lies in its specifically musical forms. This book sets out the formalist thesis that defines Hanslick’s aesthetics.
Richard Wagner : A German composer and theorist whose operas joined music, drama, poetry, and staging. Wagner’s aesthetic writings and music became major targets of Hanslick’s criticism.
Robert Schumann : A German composer and critic whose writings helped shape nineteenth-century musical criticism. Schumann’s critical legacy offers a useful comparison with Hanslick’s own influential reviewing.
Music aesthetics : The philosophical study of music’s nature, value, meaning, and experience. Hanslick’s treatise remains a central intervention in this field.
Musical formalism : An aesthetic approach that locates music’s significance chiefly in its audible structures and relations. Hanslick became the best-known nineteenth-century advocate of this approach.
Franz Liszt : A Hungarian composer and pianist who championed the symphonic poem and other programmatic music. Liszt’s program music challenged Hanslick’s preference for autonomous musical form.
Johannes Brahms : A German composer whose symphonies and chamber music drew on Classical forms. Hanslick supported Brahms and presented his work against Wagnerian musical drama.
Autonomy of art : The idea that art can be valued according to its own forms and purposes. Hanslick’s account makes musical value independent of narration or emotional depiction.
Absolute music : Instrumental music understood as meaningful without a text, program, or representation of external subjects. Hanslick defended the aesthetic autonomy of instrumental music.
Program music : Instrumental music associated with a narrative, image, or other subject beyond its sounds. Hanslick opposed treating an external program as the source of music’s beauty.
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