German music critic, aesthetician, and musicologist.

Career Summary

Hanslick studied piano in Prague with Václav Tomášek, and law first at Prague University and then in 1846 at Vienna University, gaining the doctorate of law in 1849. He began writing music criticism in the 1840s, contributing at first to the Wiener Musikzeitung, the Sonntagblätter, and the Wiener Zeitung. In 1854, he published his celebrated aesthetic treatise Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, and in 1855 he began writing reviews for the Presse, which became the Neue Freie Presse in 1864, Vienna's leading liberal daily newspaper, as the chief music critic of which until his death in 1904 he came to exert enormous influence not only over Viennese musical life but also in Germany and internationally. He taught music appreciation at Vienna University, rising in status over the years to full professor in music history and aesthetics in 1870. In 1862, he became friends with Brahms and a member of the Brahms circle. In the then current Brahms–Wagner controversy, he took Brahms's side, polemicizing against Wagner's music and music drama as well as the views expressed in his writings.

Hanslick and Schenker

During the 1890s, Hanslick and Schenker corresponded and met, Schenker consulting him in 1894 on a plan to write a "History of Melody," in which Hanslick expressed an interest. It is perhaps significant that when Schenker came to write a tribute in Die Zeit to Hanslick on the latter's 70th birthday in 1895, he recited the facts of Hanslick's career but avoided any expression of opinion, instead quoting extensively from Hermann Helmholtz. In a letter of 1933, Schenker reminisced that "With [Moriz] Violin, I played selections from [my Syrian Dances] for old Hanslick, both in the Bösendorfer Salon and in many private houses." In a letter to Eberhard Baron von Waechter in 1918, he praised Waechter's own writing, contrasting it as "a world away from Hanslick, Kretzschmar, Bekker – x, y, z, etc.." (OJ 5/43, [1]), an association which is striking because the latter two figures excited great animosity on the part of Schenker.

Correspondence

Three letters, one postcard, and one calling card, from Hanslick to Schenker, dating from the period 1894–99, survive as OJ 11/39, typed transcripts of these by Oswald Jonas surviving as OJ 59/7. One calling card from Hanslick to Eduard Bacher at the Neue Freie Presse, recommending Schenker, survives as OJ 71/14. In his private library, Schenker had many of Hanslick's books.

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