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road as Schumann’s from progressive to counterrevolutionary, Hanslick became a formidable power in keeping Vienna’s concert halls conservative citadels. Already in 1858, in his review of Lohengrin (a wildly popular work, in fact), Hanslick had begun questioning Wagner’s direction. His final metamorphosis from enthusiast to naysayer perhaps came one evening in Vienna, with a typically Wagnerian piece of nastiness. In 1862 the composer invited the critic, among others, to a reading of the new libretto for Die Meistersinger. The opera’s villain is a blustering pedant the world knows as Beckmesser, but at that time he was pointedly named “Hanslich.” As Wagner declaimed the libretto he savored the spectacle of his victim turning various colors and bolting out the door. Wagner professed sincere surprise at the critic’s change of heart afterward.15 In his essay “Jewry in Music,” Wagner made Hanslick the archetype of anti-German sentiment in the arts, which he called “music-Jewry.” (Hanslick was half-Jewish, though he denied it.)16

Through his years of largely futile Wagner-bashing the critic kept up a show of objectivity, insisting that after Tannhäuser the work he most admired was none other than Die Meistersinger. In his autobiography he came clean: “I know very well that he is the greatest living opera composer and in a historical sense the only one worth talking about … [but] Wagner’s operatic style recognizes only superlatives, and a superlative has no future.… he broke a new path, dangerous to life and limb. This path is for him alone.”17 Privately, Brahms would arrive at an assessment that, while far more generous than Hanslick’s, was not so different in drift.

If Hanslick knew all along that it was hopeless to fight Wagner and Wagnerism, he later, with Brahms egging him on, turned his guns on a more guileless target, his fellow university lecturer Anton Bruckner. Timid, nervous, perpetually the Austrian peasant lost in the big city (or acting the part), the little man stewed miserably in Hanslick’s bile. After the premiere of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony Hanslick wrote: “It is not out of the question that the future belongs to this muddled hangover style—which is no reason to regard the future with envy. For the time being, however, one would prefer that symphonic and chamber music remain undefiled by a style only relatively justified as an illustrative device for certain dramatic situations.”18 Since for years Bruckner had few powerful champions in the city, words like that took great chunks out of him. “Without Hanslick,” he groaned, “all is lost in Vienna. Ever since 1876 I have been outlawed, because I accepted the position of Instructor at the University.” Once when Franz Josef asked Bruckner what he could do as a favor, the composer begged the emperor to have a word with Hanslick about toning down his stuff.

A century later, when the principals and the passions of their causes have faded into print, these battles seem distant, pointless, laughable. For those who fought them, they were a matter of something like life and death—their own fiscal and professional life, and the life of an art in its prime. As music went, as art in Vienna went, so in some degree went the future of all the arts. And as that future played out in the century before the millennium, Hanslick and Brahms lost the battle. Wagner and the progressives set the course toward Modernism, leaving Brahms the perpetual outsider.

If a century later the battles are not so important or so central to the culture, it is because the end of Modernism left music no longer central, no longer the art to which all others arts aspire. Brahms met people in Vienna who had known Beethoven and Schubert personally, when those artists and their predecessors Haydn and Mozart were among the most exciting things happening in the Western artistic world. You could still feel that excitement on the streets of Vienna in Brahms’s time, and in the concert halls and schools and cafés and newspaper columns. In some degree the echoes of that excitement still resonate now, at the end