Hanslick´s Criticism Between Aesthetics and Scholarship

This project examines the writings of Eduard Hanslick (18251904), whose tract On the Musically Beautiful (1854) arguably represents one of theif not themost relevant aesthetic treatise of the nineteenth century. On the basis of this text, Hanslick was appointed lecturer for the History and Aesthetics of Musical Art (1856), the academic discipline later to be called musicology, which forms the earliest position of this kind not only in Vienna but rather in the entire German- speaking world. Hanslick, however, is known chiefly as probably the most important music critic of his era, whose essays, reports, and reviews were read even in America. He himself revised and published a selection of these texts in several volumes (12 vols., 18701900). While scholarship has so far focused primarily on analyzing and interpreting Eduard Hanslicks aesthetics and locating his theoretical reasoning in the context of his age, the current project explores the relations between the different textual genres of his oeuvre, which remains unclear to this very day. For if in On the Musically Beautiful, for example, Hanslick casts doubt on the frequently postulated correlation between emotion and music from an aesthetic perspective, his critical articles are interspersed with expressive metaphors that at first glance conflict with the maxims of his treatise. Other supposed deviations most likely result from the fact that Hanslicks activities as a music critic spans some sixty years (18441904) and developed dynamically over time, while his formalist aestheticsmuch of which he revised only slightly in the ten editions issued during Hanslicks lifetimeremained relatively static. The current project thus explores the dynamics of these fluid processes and analyzes to what extent Hanslicks critical writing is compatible with On the Musically Beautiful, whether genuine contradictions arise or whether later texts could even be read as an elaboration of his aesthetic approach, which has failed to sufficiently theorize essential questions such as the performative nature of music. Here, the project will furthermore reconstruct Hanslicks criteria for selecting and editing certain essays for the (sometimes thoroughly modified) textual versions provided in his manifold review collections, thereby seeking clarification about shifts in Hanslicks positions. Moreover, as he conceived of these collected volumes as a living history of music in Vienna, they will also be cross-read with Hanslicks conception of academic musical research. This view will then be extended to Hanslicks concrete language use (expression, speech figures, metaphors, etc.), which opens the project to an analysis of cultural, political, and general historical contexts as well as their shifts over time that will become the focal point of a follow-up project.