Thorn in the Flesh

Vienna's Eduard Hanslick was the most fearless and most feared music critic of his day (1825-1904), and one of the most justly renowned of all time. Writing for the last 30 years of his career in Die Neue Freie Presse, he had contemporary subjects worthy of his talents: Franz Liszt, Clara Schumann, Anton Rubinstein, Joseph Joachim, Richard Wagner, Johannes Brahms and Giuseppe Verdi. A trained musician and respectable pianist himself, Critic Hanslick was sometimes caustic, but he was always careful. His claim was that "I never criticized a composition that I had not read or played through, both before and after the performance."

A selection of Hanslick's criticism, published under the title Vienna's Golden Years of Music (Simon & Schuster; $3.75), shows how close, even in the heat of battle, the old critic came to the mark.

Measured Gravity. One of the greats who got an unwelcome notice was Franz Liszt. After Liszt dropped his dazzling career as a pianist to compose his bombastic symphonic poems (Tasso, Les Preludes, Mazeppa), Hanslick wrote with measured gravity: "The musical world has suffered, in the virtuoso's abdication, a loss which the composer's succession can hardly compensate." Liszt stuck to his composing, but the verdict of time supports Critic Hanslick.

Hanslick knew what he liked, and could tell why. He admired Clara Schumann because her playing "is a most truthful representation of magnificent compositions, but not an outpouring of a magnificent personality . . . Everything is distinct, clear, sharp as a pencil sketch." But if Hanslick had never written a word about any other musician, his place in musical history would still be secure as the sharpest thorn in the sensitive flesh of Richard Wagner.

Fatal Potion. As late as Tannhaeuser (1845), Hanslick considered Wagner "the greatest dramatic talent among all contemporary composers." But with Lohengrin, and Wagner's pronouncements about his "music of the future," Hanslick became disenchanted. He could not stomach Wagner's "exclusion of the purely human factor in favor of gods, giants, dwarfs, and their various magic arts." To Hanslick, drama should "present us with real characters, persons of flesh and blood, whose fate is determined by their own passions and decisions." He complained that even in Tristan the two principal characters are "governed by a chemical power, the fatal love potion."

Hanslick began to find Wagner "neither a great musician nor a great poet. He can be called at best . . . a decorative genius." His instrumentation, the critic wrote, "with its clever use of tone colors and its elastic application to the text . . . is what makes Wagner's music seem dazzlingly new, exotic and fabulous, and completely acceptable to many listeners as a substitute for real music."

Wagner retaliated with calculated insult. At a party, with Hanslick present, Wagner read aloud the libretto of his Die Meistersinger. In Wagner's reading, the doddering fool now known in the opera as Beckmesser was called "Hanslich." The two men never spoke again. But the insult left Hanslick's judgment unruffled when it came time to review Die Meistersinger. He found some things worth praising and praised them. In his story of "these artisans of Nuremberg, with their simple philistine adventures and plain doggerel verses," Wagner had "returned from his abstruse submarine and superterranean legends to the real theater."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.