Aesthetic Amputations: Absolute Music and the Deleted Endings of Hanslick's Vom Musikalisch-Schönen Author(s): Mark Evan Bonds Source: 19th-Century Music , Vol. 36, No. 1 (Summer 2012), pp. 3-23 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/ncm.2012.36.1.003 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to 19th-Century Music This content downloaded from 195.130.124.2 on Mon, 30 Nov 2020 11:15:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms MARK EVAN BONDS Absolute Music and Hanslick Aesthetic Amputations: Absolute Music and the Deleted Endings of Hanslick’s Vom Musikalisch-Schönen MARK EVAN BONDS Eduard Hanslick’s Vom Musikalisch-Schönen arouse emotions in listeners but insists that (On the Musically Beautiful), first published in these emotions are neither in the music nor 1854, remains the single most important docu- expressed by it. The value of a musical work, ment in the history of the aesthetic construct he maintains, resides in its beauty, which arises broadly known as “absolute music,” the idea from purely musical features that stand quite that music is an essentially self-contained and apart from any connections or symbolic asso- self-referential art. Hanslick argues that music’s ciations a particular type of theme, rhythm, content, to quote the treatise’s most celebrated harmony, or timbre might evoke in the mind of catchphrase, consists entirely and exclusively a listener. of tönend bewegte Formen, “forms set in mo- Over the next forty years, Vom Musikalisch- tion through sound” or “tonally animated Schönen would serve as a lightning rod in dis- forms.”1 He acknowledges that music can putes between self-styled “progressives” and “conservatives” about the essence of music, and Hanslick revised the text repeatedly over Preliminary versions of this article were presented as lec- the course of no fewer than ten authorial edi- tures in 2011 at Indiana University, Florida State Univer- tions, the last of which appeared in 1902. But it sity, and the University of Buffalo, State University of was the very ending of the treatise that gave New York; I am grateful to members of all three audiences for their comments and questions. Kevin Karnes, Tom him the greatest difficulty. In preparing a sec- McAuley, and Michael Morse also provided valuable sug- ond edition in 1858, Hanslick deleted all but gestions for improving a much earlier draft of this article. the first sentence of the last paragraph, and for 1Eduard Hanslick, Vom Musikalisch-Schönen: Ein Beitrag zur Revision der Ästhetik der Tonkunst, 2 vols., ed. the third edition of 1865, he deleted that one Dietmar Strauß (Mainz: Schott, 1990), I, 75. Citations to remaining sentence. By the third edition, then, Hanslick’s treatise (hereafter VMS) will be to the first vol- nothing of the original concluding paragraph ume of Strauß’s edition, which facilitates comparison across the work’s many editions; all translations in this article remained: what had originally been the treatise’s are my own. penultimate paragraph was now its conclusion. 19th-Century Music, vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 3–23 ISSN: 0148-2076, electronic ISSN 1533-8606. © 2012 by the Regents of 3 the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions Web site, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/ reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/ncm.2012.36.1.003. This content downloaded from 195.130.124.2 on Mon, 30 Nov 2020 11:15:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 19TH These three endings, at the close of the treatise’s The entire process resembles a series of am- CENTURY MUSIC final chapter on the relationship between form putations: Hanslick severed the original ending and content, read as follows: in 1858 but then in 1865 decided that he had not cut away enough of the offending text, and so he Contrary to the reproach that it lacks content, then, made a second cut. That one held. He would see music has content, though it is musical content, the treatise through seven more editions during which is no less a spark of divine fire than the his lifetime, but the double amputation of the beautiful in every other art. Only by relentlessly ending remained unchanged from the third edi- negating any and all other “content” of music, how- tion onward. ever, can one preserve its “substance.” For no intel- Amputation may seem like a violent term to lectual-spiritual meaning can be derived from the vague feeling that might somehow serve as the basis use for this process, but in making these cuts of these other kinds of content, whereas such spiri- Hanslick did real violence to his text. These tual-intellectual meaning can be derived from the deleted endings have much to tell us about the precise configuration of tones as a free creation of remainder of the treatise: we cannot grasp the the spirit out of materials that lack concepts and yet full breadth of Hanslick’s argument without are capable of being imbued with Geist. [= End of coming to terms with this suppressed conclu- third (1865) and all later editions, with the phrase sion. This is not some obscure passage buried “that lack concepts and yet are” dropped from third in the middle of an internal chapter, after all, edition onward.] nor is it a draft of something rejected before In the mind of the listener, furthermore, this in- publication. It is—or at least was—the ringing tellectual-spiritual substance unites the beautiful in peroration of his entire argument. music with all other great and beautiful ideas. [= End of second edition (1858).] It is not merely and Scholars who have addressed this closing absolutely through its own intrinsic beauty that paragraph have focused almost entirely on music affects the listener, but rather at the same Hanslick’s motivations for deleting it.3 The time as a sounding image of the great motions of the standard explanation begins and ends with the cosmos. Through profound and secret connections figure of Robert Zimmermann (1824–98), to nature, the meaning of tones elevates itself high Hanslick’s lifelong friend. The two grew up above the tones themselves, allowing us to feel at together in Prague and then later became col- the same time the infinite in works of human talent. leagues at the University of Vienna, Hanslick Just as the elements of music—sound, tone, rhythm, as Professor of Music Aesthetics and History, loudness, softness—are to be found throughout the entire universe, so does one find anew in music the entire universe. [= End of first edition (1854).]2 Töne hoch über sie selbst hinaus und läßt uns in dem Werke menschlichen Talents immer zugleich das 2VMS, p 171. “Gegenüber dem Vorwurf der Inhaltlosigkeit Unendliche fühlen. Da die Elemente der Musik: Schall, also hat die Musik Inhalt, allein musikalischen, welcher Ton, Rhythmus, Stärke, Schwäche im ganzen Universum ein nicht geringerer Funke des göttlichen Feuers ist, als sich finden, so findet der Mensch wieder in der Musik das das Schöne jeder andern Kunst. Nur dadurch aber, daß ganze Universum.” [= End of first edition (1854).] man jeden andern ‘Inhalt’ der Tonkunst unerbittlich negirt, Nothing of this concluding paragraph appears in either rettet man deren ‘Gehalt.’ Denn aus dem unbestimmten of the published English translations by Gustav Cohen Gefühle, worauf sich jener Inhalt im besten Fall (The Beautiful in Music [London: Novello, 1891]) or zurückführt, ist ihr eine geistige Bedeutung nicht Geoffrey Payzant (On the Musically Beautiful [Indianapo- abzuleiten, wohl aber aus der bestimmten Tongestaltung lis: Hackett, 1986]), which are based on the seventh and [from the third (1865) edition onward: “aus der bestimmten eighth editions of 1885 and 1891 respectively. schönen Tongestaltung . ”] als der freien Schöpfung des 3Felix Printz was the first to discuss the repressed ending Geistes aus geistfähigem, begriffslosem Material.” [= End in any detail; see his Zur Würdigung des musikästhetischen of third (1865) and all later editions, with the wording Formalismus Eduard Hanslicks (Borna-Leipzig: R. Noske, altered to read: “als der freien Schöpfung des Geistes aus 1918), pp. 7–9. See also Rudolf Schäfke, Eduard Hanslick geistfähigem Material.”] und die Musikästhetik (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1922), “Dieser geistige Gehalt verbindet nun auch im Gemüth pp. 28–31; and Carl Dahlhaus, Die Idee der absoluten des Hörers das Schöne der Tonkunst mit allen andern Musik (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1978), pp. 33–34, trans. Roger großen und schönen Ideen. [= End of second edition (1858).] Lustig as The Idea of Absolute Music (Chicago: University Ihm wirkt die Musik nicht blos und absolut durch ihre of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 27–29. In the commentary eigenste Schönheit, sondern zugleich als tönendes Abbild volume to his edition of VMS (II, 20–65), Strauß surveys der großen Bewegungen im Weltall. Durch tiefe und the scholarship that addresses all of Hanslick’s many revi- geheime Naturbeziehungen