Apology for Beckmesser
IF it means anything at all to him, the name of Edward Hanslick suggests to the average musical reader the embodiment of academic obscurantism and of a peevish opposition to the originality of genius. The average reader has, in fact, accepted the portrait drawn by Wagner and his devotees of a critic who dared to discern certain weaknesses in the master's works, and certain dangers to the art of music in a blind adherence to his theories. And the average reader is hardly to blame for following where he is led by such men above the average as Mr. Ernest Newman, who writes down Hanslick as "the most colossal charlatan and ignoramus," or Sir Donald Tovey, who professed to have failed to discover in his writings "any knowledge of anything whatsoever."
The rehabilitation of a music critic, who died thirty-six years ago, may seem an odd task to undertake, but Mr. Stewart Deas has performed his task with so much skill in the compression of his material, and with one eye so firmly fixed upon the general principles of criticism as an art, that his little book, so far from being a tedious re-hash of old controversies, has the positive merit of constructive thought. He has done for his readers all the dull work of reading Hanslick's works—the essay on aesthetics, Vom Musikalisch-Schonen, is the only one translated into English, and very ponderous its nineteenth-century German style is !—and has gleaned for us the virtues they contain. He shows Hanslick to have been anything but obscurantist in his views. His criticism of Wagner is by no means all adverse, and when he finds fault, it is not with minor details, but with fundamentals: Wagner's operatic style exists in an atmosphere of superlatives ; but no superlative has a future, it is the end, not the beginning. [He] has laid down a new way for himself which is vitally dangerous; but it is a way for him alone; whoever follows will perish and the public will witness his misfortune with indifference. The shade of Hanslick," comments Mr. Deas, "may be allowed a quiet smile of satisfaction at the accuracy of his forecast." Hanslick had, too, the true critic's magnanimity. After all the mud that was flung at him, after, even, the characteristically caddish conduct of Wagner, who invited him to hear the reading of the libretto of Die Meistersinger, in which Beckmesser origin- ally appeared as Hans Lich, he could still write of Wagner with dignity and without rancour. If his criticism of Brahms and the rest seems nowadays an old story, it must not be forgotten, as Sir Donald Tovcy seems to have done, that he was writing about contemporary music. When that is remembered, his criticism is seen to be the work of an acute intelligence, and one suspects that, where his judgement was at fault in assessing a new work by Brahms, the mistake was due to a too meticulous honesty in writing about a composer who was also an intimate friend. If any among us today makes no worse mistakes, he will deserve a similar resurrection a generation hence.
DYNELEY HUSSEY.
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