Abstract
Eduard Hanslick's The Beautiful in Music (1854) is a classic of musical aesthetics. Its influence has been profound, not least as a polemic against Wagner's Opera and Drama (1851). The polemic was defended by the author in his preface to the seventh edition of 1885, which contains the oft-quoted evaluation of music drama as ‘formlessness exalted into a principle’. The Hanslick/Wagner debate defines an aesthetic and theoretical ground zero around which significant forces have been arrayed. The results have been complex and mixed. While Wagner's music prevailed and his theories were generally dismissed, Hanslick's rejection of music as a medium for expressing feelings articulated an approach brought to fruition by Heinrich Schenker (who unsurprisingly shared Hanslick's negative view of Wagner as well as his polemical tendencies).
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