Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [162]
Hanslick’s fame spread beyond Vienna with the 1854 publication of his brochure On Beauty in Music. Eventually translated into several languages and running through ten editions in German, it proclaimed a doctrine summarized in its more notorious aphorisms:
Definite feelings and emotions are unsusceptible of being embodied in music.… To the question: What is to be expressed with all this material? The answer will be: Musical ideas. Now, a musical idea reproduced in its entirety is not only an object of intrinsic beauty but also an end in itself, and not a means for representing feelings and thoughts.
The essence of music is sound and motion.
For the nineteenth century those words defined the concept of “absolute music,” an instrumental art pure, abstract, objective, beyond words. Among those who kept that faith, Hanslick’s pamphlet became sacred text, a small but potent counterblow to the New German/Wagnerians aesthetic edifice. Brahms’s first reaction to On Beauty in Music, written to Clara Schumann in his Kreisler years, had been: “I found such a number of stupid things in it that I gave it up.” In the next decade, when Brahms got to know and need the critic, he sang a contrasting variation.
Like those pronouncements, Hanslick’s ideas tended to the grandiose and absolute, even though as a writer his style was finely honed and aimed to a broad audience. Those features suited a time when high art was more broadly popular than it had ever been. Knowledgeable in music history and competent at the keyboard, Hanslick still managed to be oddly and tellingly unmusical. His friend, the surgeon and musical amateur Theodor Billroth, once complained after a session of chamber music, “The schoolmasterly way he performs everything, with his dry tone and without the slightest grasp of the whole, often drives me nearly to distraction.”13 Hanslick could not play legato to save his life, and Brahms’s favorite two-against-three rhythms left him floundering at the keys.
Hawk-nosed, bushy-eyebrowed, fiercely vain though essentially good-natured and honest, in lifestyle (like Brahms) a North German bourgeois, Hanslick was one of the last critics to present his judgments as something approaching dogma. The reason so few followed suit was that he so often managed to be imperiously, impeccably, historically wrong. Hanslick swung his sword at the tide of history so uncompromisingly that ever after, in judging new work, music critics have tended to hedge their bets. Since Hanslick, reviewers have looked anxiously to the past and its collections of stupid reviews, whose star attraction is always Hanslick, and reviewers have not wanted to be part of future collections. This is the man who after viewing the premiere of Wagner’s Das Rheingold at Bayreuth listed a few of its undeniable virtues and then went on for page after page about its “deceit, prevarication, violence and animal sensuality … this unctuous pedant [Wotan] revered as the godly ideal of the German people?” His infamous review of another new work concluded, “The violin is no longer played; it is yanked about, it is torn asunder, it is beaten black and blue.… We see wild and vulgar faces, we hear curses, we smell bad brandy.… Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto brings to us for the first time the horrid idea that there may be music that stinks in the ear.” (Tchaikovsky could recite that review word for word.) Meanwhile, like most Viennese, Hanslick had no great affection for pre-Classical music, confessing that he would burn all of Schütz and a good deal of Bach for a few more works by Brahms and Schumann.14
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