Eduard Hanslick’s 'Vom Musikalisch-Schönen': Text, Contexts, and their Developmental Dimensions; towards a Dynamic View of Hanslick’s Aesthetics

• Main Authors: Christoph Landerer, Alexander Wilfing
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Österreichische Gesellschaft für Musikwissenschaft 2018-08-01
• Series: Musicologica Austriaca
• Subjects: 19th century; aesthetics; Austrian philosophy; formalism; Eduard Hanslick; Johann Friedrich Herbart; Textual Analysis; Friedrich Theodor Vischer; Robert Zimmermann
• Online Access: http://www.musau.org/parts/neue-article-page/view/51

This article deals with Eduard Hanslick’s aesthetic classic 'Vom Musikalisch-Schönen' (“On the Musically Beautiful”), or VMS, regarding both the text itself and its most important contexts. We first give an overview of the history of relevant scholarship and relevant research perspectives and then sketch what we believe are the main current challenges of Hanslick scholarship: (a) an understanding of VMS as a fusion of different, often heterogeneous philosophical orientations and their embedment in political and institutional factors and (b) an understanding of VMS as a ‘dynamic text,’ that is, a text that develops out of pre-publications and evolves over the different editions and even chapters of the book, thus challenging traditional views of VMS as a monolithic, uniform text with a set of stable and determinable arguments. Rather than investigating ‘the’ aesthetics of VMS, Hanslick scholarship, we believe, needs to place more emphasis on how Hanslick’s argument develops over time and what factors are decisive for the many textual decisions that Hanslick made from the pre-publications of 1853 and 1854 up to the ‘final’ edition of 1902. Our approach integrates the older intellectual history approach and newer trends towards a broader contextualization and demonstrates how more information on the generic context of Hanslick’s aesthe­tic ideas can also shed light on the intellectual foundations of his treatise as well as on the development of his aesthetic positions.