Eduard Hanslick

Eduard Hanslick (1825–1904) was a Bohemian-born musicologist.

Eduard Hanslick

Quotes

• Music has no subject beyond the combinations of notes we hear, for music speaks not only by means of sounds, it speaks nothing but sound.
  • Eduard Hanslick, quoted by Wolfgang Sandberger (1996) in the liner notes to the Juilliard String Quartet's Intimate Letters. Sony Classical SK 66840.

• You cannot imagine the wild enthusiasm that these two men created in Vienna. Newspapers went into raptures over each new waltz, and innumerable articles appeared about Lanner and Strauss.
  • Quoted by Bob January

• That the sweetly intoxicating three-four rhythm which took hold of hand & foot, necessarily eclipsed great & serious music & made the audience unfit for any intellectual effort goes without saying.
  • Quoted by Long Beach Opera Co.

• The Prelude to Tristan and Isolde reminds me of the old Italian painting of a martyr whose intestines are slowly unwound from his body on a reel.
  • Neue Frei Presse

• (Referring to the music of Anton Bruckner) "Nightmarish hangover style" (traumverwirrten Katzenjammerstil)
  • From Norman Lebrecht, The Book of Musical Anecdotes (1985, Sphere Books)

• The beautiful is and remains beautiful though it arouse no emotion whatever, and though there be no one to look at it. In other words, although the beautiful exists for the gratification of an observer, it is independent of him. In this sense music, too, has no aim (object), and the mere fact that this particular art is so closely bound up with our feelings by no means justifies the assumption that its aesthetic principles depend on this union.
  • The Beautiful in Music (1854)

• Music means itself.
  • The Beautiful in Music (1854)

• [Music is] a language which we speak and understand but cannot translate
  • Quoted in Harper-Scott and Samson, An Introduction to Music Studies (2009) p.87