Musicology

Hanslick in Context

PROJECT III: Eduard Hanslick’s “Vom Musikalisch-Schönen”: An Analysis of the Dynamic Features of the Text and Its Contexts

Titelblatt Vom Musikalisch-Schönen. Ein Beitrag zur Revision der Ästhetik der Tonkunst (Leipzig 1854) von Eduard Hanslick nach der achten Auflage, Leipzig 1891.

The project resumes our treatment of Eduard Hanslick’s Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (On the Musically Beautiful) as a dynamic corpus of textual material, while significantly expanding our respective investigation. The period of analysis now covers the years 1848 to 1902 and thereby includes all ten versions of Vom Musikalisch-Schönen that were edited by Hanslick during his lifetime, as well as the evolution of his arguments in preliminary publications and remarks on the themes of his aesthetic treatise in his musical criticism and other textual formats. This substantial expansion of the time frame of our investigation also corresponds to a newly developed and much more comprehensive understanding of the central contexts. We now proceed to distinguish between the theoretical contexts of Vom Musikalisch-Schönen and its stages of continuous development (essential theoretical discourses in a broad sense with the core areas of philosophy, science, music theory) and the practical contexts of this book (political setting, institutional affiliations, personal networks). Said theoretical contextual fields are examined in great detail both at the intradiscursive level (development of the individual discursive formations) and the interdiscursive level (interaction of the discursive formations with each other). The specific analyses cover three areas: (a) the historical evolution of Hanslick’s arguments from approx. 1848 to the initial edition of 1854, (b) the genesis, layout, and structure of the arguments within the wording of edition 1 and primarily the conceptual development of central notions within the chapters, and (c) Hanslick’s variation of essential arguments in later editions, up to edition 10 of 1902. This approach is moreover intended to replace a rather static understanding of Hanslick’s aesthetics with a dynamic reading, capable of illuminating how elementary references, ideas, and terms are transformed continuously from the individual perspective of Hanslick’s various editions. This very “dynamization” of Vom Musikalisch-Schönen contributes significantly to a fuller grasp and more appropriate understanding of this essential aesthetic treatise, the historical reception of which frequently overlooks how the dynamic properties of contexts and text(s) deeply affect our interpretation of Hanslick’s concepts and methods.

PROJEKT II: Studies in the Genesis of Eduard Hanslick’s “Vom Musikalisch-Schönen”: Textual and Contextual Analysis

Büste Eduard Hanslicks im Arkadenhof der Universität Wien, nach einem Gipsmodell von Viktor Tilgner, 1913 (Foto: Alexander Wilfing, Wien, 2014)

The project picks up from the project “Hanslick in Context: Hanslick’s Aesthetic Ideas, Their Genesis, and Their Place in the History of Ideas” and expands our research approach by including the dimension of the historical evolution of the book itself, which is now investigated from a more systematic perspective. Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (On the Musically Beautiful) is now considered a dynamic textual corpus, which permits claims regarding “the” aesthetics of Eduard Hanslick solely on basis of detailed genetic studies. The genetic and historical dimension of the text is analyzed carefully as regards the emergence of this book from pre-publications of 1853 and 1854 (chapters 4, 5, and 6), the chronological as well as logical order of the seven chapters, and the crucial changes in the new editions of 1858 (2nd edition) and 1865 (3rd edition), which are also important regarding Hanslick’s reception in aesthetic discourse. Vom Musikalisch-Schönen thus appears neither as an “aphoristic” collection of older texts, nor as a purposefully straightforward monograph, but as a text with a complex argument structure, which can only be grasped by means of specific genetic analyses. Our reconstruction of the chronological and logical fabric of Vom Musikalisch-Schönen revealed a surprising chapter sequence (6, 4, 5, 1, 2, 3, 7) that contradicts the familiar sequence of published chapters. We combine this textual problem with the continued examination of relevant contexts, which might have caused the corresponding textual changes and ongoing variation of Hanslick’s arguments in a direct manner. Here, we also focus on Hanslick’s political contexts and institutional affiliations, which proved crucial for the realization of his academic career strategy. Apart from these contextual and textual studies, we moreover include empirical documents (letters, files, etc.), which provide an additional methodological dimension and add depth to our research findings. These (unfortunately rather sparse) documents are furthermore supplemented by a detailed analysis of Hanslick’s personal contacts with prominent nineteenth-century aesthetic theorists (e.g., Robert Zimmermann) and the overall political situation in Vienna; on that front, we consider Hanslick’s activities at Count Thun’s Ministry of Education and its positivistic orientation to be of particular relevance. Such contexts also illuminate significant modifications in edition 2 of Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, which retracts remnants of Romantic aesthetics and reinforces its formalistic orientation.

PROJECT I: Hanslick in Context: Eduard Hanslick’s Aesthetic Ideas, Their Genesis, and Their Place in the History of Ideas

The project aims at critically analyzing the “eclectic” intellectual background of Eduard Hanslick’s aesthetic treatise Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (On the Musically Beautiful), the genetic factors of which are made transparent from an overarching perspective. Here, we focus on grasping Hanslick’s method of selectively integrating different philosophical discourses as well as his use of textual sources, thereby providing a stable basis for Hanslick scholarship, which has reached strikingly disparate findings in assessing the historical background of Vom Musikalisch-Schönen. In a first step, we take into account various positions in nineteenth-century aesthetic discourse, whose respective relevance for Hanslick’s reasoning had for the most part been scrutinized separately. In consideration of our hypothesis that Hanslick’s treatise cannot be assigned to any individual philosophical movement and that it is of a quasi-hybrid nature, we analyze the various sources of his remarks and methods in a broad fashion. In addition to philosophers prominent in Hanslick literature—e.g. Bolzano, Hegel, Herbart, Kant, Vischer, and Zimmermann—we integrate lesser-known figures such as Gutt, Hand, Michaelis, Nägeli, and Weisse into this discursive formation. We moreover examine the parameters of Habsburg education policy and its influence on Hanslick’s aesthetics, which evolved in intimate contact with the Austrian Ministry of Education—led by Count von Thun und Hohenstein—the empirical-formalistic orientation of which also shaped some of his primary doctrines. In addition to Hanslick’s contacts with central figures of the Thun reform, we analyze the genetic aspects of his aesthetic position. Besides content-related factors, this includes questions concerning methodology, e.g. Hanslick’s juridical training and the scientific-theoretical orientation of Austria. In this vein, we are able to integrate established intellectual-historical research methods with current trends towards a broader historical contextualization of Hanslick’s Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, consequently demonstrating how the genetic context of this book illuminates the intellectual foundations of Hanslick’s aesthetics. We thus make clear how the complex and neglected interplay between philosophical orientations, specific aesthetic traditions, institutional and political settings, and personal relations affected Hanslick’s positions, which did not mature in post-1848 Vienna by historical accident. It is only against this diversified background that one can hope to grasp the peculiarities of an aesthetic approach which otherwise defies proper classification in terms of intellectual coordinates and was devised in a wide field of tension between philosophical, aesthetic, political, scientific, and juridical discourses.

 

 

Publications resulting from the three sub-projects

 

Lectures resulting from the three sub-projects

 

 

Project lead

Christoph Landerer

 

Team

Alexander Wilfing
Meike Wilfing-Albrecht (project III)

 

Duration

Project I: 2014–2017
Project II: 2017–2018
Project III: 2018–2022

 

Funding

Project I: 10.55776/P26610
Project II: OeNB 17508
Project III: 10.55776/P3055

 

Collaborators

Barbara Boisits
Mark Evan Bonds
Bojan Bujic
Stephen Davies
Lydia Goehr
Thomas Grey
Nicole Grimes
Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen
Lee Rothfarb
Arne Stollberg
Dietmar Strauß
Nick Zangwill

 

Links

Hanslick Online