" Yes, he plays like a god ," Hanslick writes in closing, " and we do not take it amiss if, from time to time, he changes, like Jupiter, into a bull ".

This chapter critiques the standing aesthetics of music as Hanslick sees it, which he refers to as the “ aesthetics of feeling .” He also asserts the autonomy of music, writing, “ The beautiful is and remains beautiful though it arouse no emotion whatever, and though there be no one to look at it.

Hanslick suggests, “ Melody is the ‘ initial force ,’ the life-blood, the primitive cell of the musical organism, with which the drift and development of the composition are closely bound up .” He continues to state the both melody and harmony are “ achievement of man .” Rhythm and in particular duple meter, however, he believes is found in nature: “ It is the only musical element which nature possesses, the first we are conscious of, and that with which the mind of the infant and the savage becomes soonest familiar .” He continues to posit that music is a product of the mind, having no precursor in nature.

Eduard Hanslick, a music critic in Vienna at this time, reported: “ The Rhapsody was respectfully but not warmly received.

In the Brahms camp were his close friends: Clara Schumann, the influential music critic Eduard Hanslick, and the leading Viennese surgeon Theodor Billroth.

( I doubt that anyone, except perhaps the nineteenth-century critic Hanslick, has ever really believed that, although some musicians have been goaded into proclaiming it by the sillier interpretations of music with which we are often assailed.

* August 6 – Eduard Hanslick, Austrian music critic ( b. 1825 )

* September 11 – Eduard Hanslick, Austrian music critic ( d. 1904 )

At the time there was a feud between advocates of the music of Wagner and Brahms ; by aligning himself with Wagner, Bruckner made an unintentional enemy out of Hanslick.

Viennese music critic Eduard Hanslick expressed what Schonberg calls " the majority point of view " in an 1884 review.

* August 6-Eduard Hanslick, music critic ( b. 1825 )

The influential critic Eduard Hanslick called it " long and pretentious " and said that it " brought us face to face with the revolting thought that music can exist which stinks to the ear ".

Eduard Hanslick ( 11 September 1825 – 6 August 1904 ) was a Bohemian-Austrian music critic.

Hanslick was born in Prague, the son of Joseph Adolph Hanslick, a bibliographer and music teacher from a German-speaking family, and one of his piano pupils, the daughter of a Jewish merchant from Vienna.

At the age of 18 Hanslick went to study music with Václav Tomášek, one of Prague's renowned musicians.

From this point on, Hanslick found his sympathies moving away from the so-called ' music of the Future ' associated with Wagner and Liszt, and more towards music he conceived as directly descending from the traditions of Mozart, Beethoven and Schumann — in particular the music of Johannes Brahms ( who dedicated to him his set of waltzes opus 39 for piano duet ).

Being a close friend of Brahms from 1862, Hanslick possibly had some influence on Brahms's composing, often getting to hear new music before it was published.

Hanslick saw Wagner's reliance on dramatics and word-painting as inimical to the nature of music, which he thought to be expressive solely by virtue of its form, and not through any extra-musical associations.

Hanslick is noted as one of the first widely influential music critics.

Hanslick was an outspoken opponent of the music of Liszt and Wagner, which broke down traditional musical forms as a means of communicating something extra-musical.

Hanslick posits that since emotion is not present in the music ( objective ) but is dependent on the listener ’ s interpretation ( subjective ) it cannot be the basis for an aesthetics of music.

It is sometimes claimed that Wagner caricatured Hanslick in his opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg as the carping critic Beckmesser.

It is along these lines that Hanslick became one of Brahms ’ s champions ( although he did not rave about every piece, notably the Third Symphony ), and often pitted him against Wagner.

Importantly, while this text certainly lays the theoretical groundwork for musical formalism, formal analysis is something that Hanslick himself never did.

Hanslick concludes that the idea in music can only be purely musical (“ Music consists of successions and forms of sound, and these alone constitute the subject ”), and the value of a piece of music is determined by the relation between the idea ( for example the theme ) and the whole of the work.

While not all critics and composers agree with this usage, it is conventional to see this period as a relatively continuous evolution in style, even though many influential composers and critics drew a sharp break around mid-century ; for example Hanslick and Richard Wagner both agreed that their era was not " Romantic ".

The thesis that the value of music is related to its representational function was vigorously countered by the formalism of Eduard Hanslick, setting off the " War of the Romantics.

The 19th century music critic Eduard Hanslick argued that music could be enjoyed as pure sound and form, that it needed no connotation of extra-musical elements to warrant its existence.

:“ Music has no subject beyond the combinations of notes we hear, for music speaks not only by means of sounds, it speaks nothing but sound .” — Eduard Hanslick

Contentious opinions include those of prominent critics including Eduard Hanslick, who praised the form for its intelligibility.

Hanslick often served on juries for musical competitions and held a post at the Austrian Ministry of Culture and fulfilled other administrative roles.

The much more famous critic, Eduard Hanslick, championed Brahms from his post in Vienna as the critic for the prestigious Neue freie Presse.

The recent premiere of his Third Symphony had been nothing short of disastrous, receiving an extremely negative, though not surprising review from Eduard Hanslick, given Hanslick's predilection for the works of Brahms.

" This fight divided the aesthetics into two competing groups: On one side are formalists ( e. g., Hanslick ), who emphasize that the rewards of music are found in appreciation of musical form or design, while on the other side are the anti-formalists, such as Richard Wagner, who regarded musical form as a means to other artistic ends.

Other famous scholars who have taught at the University of Vienna are: Theodor W. Adorno, Manfred Bietak, Theodor Billroth, Ludwig Boltzmann, Franz Brentano, Anton Bruckner, Rudolf Carnap, Conrad Celtes, Viktor Frankl, Sigmund Freud, Eduard Hanslick, Edmund Hauler, Hans Kelsen, Adam František Kollár, Johann Josef Loschmidt, Fran Miklošič, Oskar Morgenstern, Otto Neurath, Johann Palisa, Pope Pius II, Baron Carl von Rokitansky, August Schleicher, Moritz Schlick, Ludwig Karl Schmarda, Joseph von Sonnenfels, Josef Stefan, Leopold Vietoris, Jalile Jalil, Carl Auer von Welsbach, and Olga Taussky-Todd.

( I doubt that anyone, except perhaps the nineteenth-century critic Hanslick, has ever really believed that, although some musicians have been goaded into proclaiming it by the sillier interpretations of music with which we are often assailed.

The compositional school focused around Liszt and Wagner – the so called " New German School " – argued in favor of literary inspiration ( see Program music ), while another camp, centered around Schumann, Brahms, and Hanslick argued that " pure " music should follow the forms laid out by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.

Both Rubinstein's virtues and flaws, Hanslick commented, spring from an untapped natural strength and elemental freshness.

It was called the Marseillaise of the heart ( Eduard Hanslick, a critic from Vienna in the past century ) and was supposed to have saved Vienna the revolution ( sentence of a biographer of the composer Johann Strauss I ), while Strauss I himself was called the Napoleon Autrichien ( Heinrich Laube, poet from the north of Germany ).

Tchaikovsky, hurt at my delay in playing the concerto in public and quite rightly too ( I have often deeply regretted it, and before his death received absolution from him ), now proceeded to have a second edition published, and dedicated the concerto this time to Adolf Brodsky, who brought it out in Vienna, where it met with much adverse criticism, especially from Hanslick.

Billroth and Brahms, together with the acerbic and influential Viennese music critic Eduard Hanslick, formed the core of the musical conservatives who opposed the innovations of Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt.

Here, Hanslick touched on the most common complaint about Bruckner's symphonic writing: the seemingly endless journey to a conclusion of musical thought.