Music Criticisms 1846-99 [Paperback]

Eduard Hanslick (Author)

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• Paperback
• Publisher: Penguin (1950)
• ASIN: B002AZUFOY
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,755,369 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5.0 out of 5 stars MEDIOCRITY'S OWN MARTYR, January 11, 2010

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DAVID BRYSON (Glossop Derbyshire England) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Music Criticisms 1846 99 (Paperback)

Whatever you think of the musical criticisms of Eduard Hanslick, this is an absolutely superb edition, and the 5 stars are for that and for the editor and translator Henry Pleasants. As music critics go, Hanslick is among the best known, at least by repute. He is the original of Beckmesser in The Mastersingers, and indeed even in advanced drafts of the libretto the character was still called Veit Hanslich. Bruckner appealed to the Emperor Franz Josef to do something about him, and Brahms dedicated his Waltzes op 39 to him. How many modern musicians, or even sociologists, have actually read much by him is problematical, but the reactions that he aroused in his day should be at least as interesting to the latter community as to the former.

Pleasants is motivated by a sense of fairness. He is surely quite correct when he says at the end of his preface that Hanslick is better known by what others have written about him than by what he wrote himself. He concludes by saying that Hanslick `...fared badly, in his own time, at the hands of "the Wagnerites", and worse, in later years, at the hands of those from whom he might have expected more appreciative treatment.' Who `those' might be he doesn't say. However Pleasants was writing in 1950, and Donald Francis Tovey was only 5 or 6 years dead at that date. Tovey was, and I suppose still is, considered eminent among writers on music. He was an inspiration to many a musically minded youngster such as myself. However he was never inhibited from writing grandiosely on certain topics when he knew next to nothing about them. Moreover he had a related and rather despicable tendency to sing along with fashion, Hanslick was unfashionable, and Tovey wrote a quite extraordinary attack on him that I feel sure is what Pleasants had in mind. Tovey claimed to have read the collected writings of Hanslick and not found in them any knowledge of anything whatsoever. Hanslick's career he described as `one of the unlovelier forms of parasitism', citing in support of this opinion his allegation that Hanslick had not attempted any creative work. I have not heard the collected creative work of Tovey, but I do own a couple of discs of it and all I can say is that he would have been better following Hanslick's example.

One thing Hanslick was quite unquestionably was a gentleman. You do not find him writing that sort of thing, he speaks for himself without relying on supporters, he does not whine or use hyperbole, and he does not impute motivations, prejudices or character traits to anyone whose work he feels impelled to criticise. It would not be possible to say all that of Hugo Wolf. Hanslick can also be extremely witty in an elegant and caustic way, and that must have been what most wounded Wagner in Hanslick's critical salvoes. So far so good. Now what about his actual critical writings?

Pleasants has an admirable phrase, which I quote from his introductory essay, to the effect that an early piece by Hanslick `revealed a great critical talent, if hardly a great critic.' That sums Hanslick up, I should say. His mind was analytical in bent, and such an analytical faculty is most evident when he is subjecting something to critical examination. Read him on Wagner's librettos, and it is hard to gainsay many of his arguments that parts of the plots are awkward and confused. My own view is that Wagner's plots have to be taken as a package deal with the music, and that Wagner creates a universe of his own in which such purely rational considerations are an intrusion and an irrelevance. Shaw had a more developed apologia for Wagner's mythos that found it to be not irrational but supra-rational. You may well consider Shaw's sophistries to be too clever by half and my own surrender of the rational faculty to be feeble minded, but in terms of staying out of trouble with Wagner's partisans we both get away with our shortcomings simply by coming down on Wagner's side. I at least, and probably also Shaw to a great extent, are instinctively pro-Wagner because we are powerfully affected by Wagner's music. Hanslick, alas, had a tin ear for that, the Wagnerites rounded on him as Pleasants says, Tovey rounded on him as I suspect Pleasants is hinting, nobody much bothers to read him and he has become an aunt sally in consequence.

Myself, I am not a disciple of positive thinking and I both like Hanslick best and find him most valuable when he goes on the attack. His appreciations of, say, the Brahms symphonies are rather pedantic and schoolmasterish. He is conservative, and so are we all in different ways, but not to the extent Hanslick is in wanting no further advance in musical technique beyond Beethoven's 9th symphony. It's not just that he has a comfort zone - we all do - it's that his comfort zone is so circumscribed and his intellectual curiosity so stunted. On the one hand not only can I endorse what he says about Bruckner: what he says, (and I support), about Liszt's symphonic poems is backed up by Shaw himself, whose hilarious rewriting of the programme for the Dante Symphony is something I commend to everyone. Progress and change are not self-defined good things, I grant Hanslick that, but I simply cannot see how we can expect the human imagination to stop dead in its tracks either with Beethoven's 9th symphony or with anything else.

However for Hanslick even the 5/4 metre in Tchaikovsky's Pathetique was intolerable. That is not something we can write off to the novelty of the work. It is some strange mental or imaginative block, and no wonder Wagner was beyond him. However, many thanks to Pleasants, not least for the genuine and readable English of his translation.