Eduard Hanslick quotes

Eduard Hanslick was an Austrian music critic and aesthetician, renowned for his influential writings on music. His work, especially "On the Musically Beautiful," significantly shaped 19th-century music criticism and aesthetics. He advocated for the autonomy of music and played a key role in debates between supporters of Brahms and Wagner. Here are 10 of his quotes:

The Prelude to Tristan and Isolde reminds me of the old Italian painting of a martyr whose intestines are slowly unwound from his body on a reel.

Eduard Hanslick

The beautiful is and remains beautiful though it arouse no emotion whatever, and though there be no one to look at it. In other words, although the beautiful exists for the gratification of an observer, it is independent of him. In this sense music, too, has no aim (object), and the mere fact that this particular art is so closely bound up with our feelings by no means justifies the assumption that its aesthetic principles depend on this union.

Eduard Hanslick

That the sweetly intoxicating three-four rhythm which took hold of hand & foot, necessarily eclipsed great & serious music & made the audience unfit for any intellectual effort goes without saying.

Eduard Hanslick

You cannot imagine the wild enthusiasm that these two men created in Vienna. Newspapers went into raptures over each new waltz, and innumerable articles appeared about Lanner and Strauss.

Eduard Hanslick

An art aims, above all, at producing something beautiful which affects not our feelings but the organ of pure contemplation, our imagination.

Eduard Hanslick

Grant that the true organ with which the beautiful is apprehended is the imagination, and it follows that all arts are likely to affect the feelings indirectly.

Eduard Hanslick

The course hitherto pursued in musical aesthetics has nearly always been hampered by the false assumption that the object was not so much to inquire into what is beautiful in music as to describe the feelings which music awakens.

Eduard Hanslick

(Referring to the music of Anton Bruckner) "Nightmarish hangover style" (traumverwirrten Katzenjammerstil)

Eduard Hanslick

Music means itself.

Eduard Hanslick