MUSIC - HANSLICK (Eduard): Du beau dans la musique. Essay on - Lot 118

MUSIC - HANSLICK (Eduard): Du beau dans la musique. Essay on the reform of musical aesthetics. Translated from the German on the fifth edition by Charles bannelier. Paris, Brandus et Cie, 1877. Large in-8 contemporary green half-chagrin, ornate ribbed spine, 126 pp. + table. French first edition. Hanslick is considered one of the most influential critics of the 19th century. This essay is his first work. Defining a new musical aesthetic, it made him famous and long regarded as a founder of modern aesthetics. This theory, set out in "Vom Musikalisch-Schönen" (Leipzig, 1854; 16th ed. 1966, translated into French as "Du beau dans la musique", by Ch. Bannelier, Paris, 1877, our copy), provoked much controversy. It was opposed to Romantic sentimentalism, for which the musical work was first and foremost the representation of feelings. According to Hanslick, on the contrary, "musical beauty" resided in the work itself, in an immanent and specific way. Against program-based music, he declared that music could express nothing other than itself, and could therefore only be explained by analyzing the musical phenomenon alone. The singularity of music in relation to other arts and disciplines meant that it had to be studied by means of a specific, autonomous aesthetic: music itself defined and limited the science that analyzed it.Hanslick's formalism, which to a certain extent echoed Schopenhauer's, led him to emphasize the notion of theme as the "substance" of the work and the generator of form; he thus condemned the sterility of the works of his time, and in particular Wagner's "infinite melody", which he described as "the absence of form erected in principle". From this point onwards, Hanslick, disparaged by Wagner as Beckmesser in The Master Singers, championed Brahms and Verdi.