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 Tannhäuser (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."