Eduard Hanslick’s Criticism between Aesthetics, Journalism, and Scholarship

This research project examines the writings of Eduard Hanslick (1825–1904), whose "Vom Musikalisch-Schönen" ("On the Musically Beautiful," 1854) arguably presents one of the – if not the – most central aesthetic treatises of the nineteenth century. In virtue of this text, Hanslick was appointed lecturer in the History and Aesthetics of Music—the eventual discipline of "musicology"—in 1856, the earliest position of this kind in Vienna and German-language academia more generally. Hanslick, however, is remembered primarily as probably the most important music critic of his era, whose essays, reports, and reviews were read even in America and which he himself edited and published in several volumes (12 volumes, 1870–1900).

While scholarship has so far chiefly focused on examining, interpreting, and contextualizing Hanslick’s aesthetics historically, the current project explores the relations between the different categories of Hanslick’s writings, which remain unclear. If, for example, the causal relation between emotion and music is contested in principle in "Vom Musikalisch-Schönen," Hanslick’s criticism is interspersed with expressive metaphors that at first glance come into conflict with the central tenets of his famous treatise. These and additional (supposed) inconsistencies might derive from the fact that Hanslick’s activity as a critic spans some sixty years (1844–1904) and developed dynamically over time, while his aesthetic treatise—which he typically modified only slightly in later revised editions—remained relatively static.