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Realism, Idealism and the French Reception of Hanslick

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2016

Noel Verzosa
Noel Verzosa*
Affiliation:
Hood College, USA Email: verzosa@hood.edu
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Abstract

When Charles Bannelier’s French translation of Hanslick’s Vom Musikalisch-Schönen was published in 1877, it elicited discussions among French musicians and critics that can seem puzzling from our twenty-first century vantage point. The French were almost entirely ambivalent to the issue of descriptive versus non-programmatic music and were perfectly comfortable disregarding this seemingly central point of contention in Hanslick’s treatise. French critics focused instead on issues that seem tangential to the main thrust of Vom Musikalisch-Schönen: German music education, the merits of philosophy versus philology, and so forth.

The French reception of Hanslick becomes less puzzling, however, when we consider the conceptual framework within which French musical discourse operated in the late nineteenth century. By 1877, musical aesthetics and criticism in France were an extension of broader trends in French intellectual culture, in which a materialist, realist view of the world vied with a metaphysical, idealist conception of the divine. Between these two ideological poles lay a rich spectrum of ideas that had profound ramifications for music and art criticism. The degree to which works of art could be understood as products of historical circumstances, for example, or whether art embodied ineffable meanings resisting explanation, were questions whose answers depended on one’s position along this realist–idealist spectrum.

In this article, I show how this tension between realism and idealism formed the conceptual framework for French critics’ readings of Hanslick’s Vom Musikalisch-Schönen. I survey writings by Théodule Ribot, Jules Combarieu, Camille Bellaigue and others to show how this network of texts, when placed alongside each other, was effectively a manifestation of the realist–idealist spectrum. By putting these writings in conversation with each other, this article brings to light the intellectual premises of French writings on music in the nineteenth century. Only by understanding these premises, I argue, can we make sense of the French reception of Hanslick.

Type
Research Article
Information
Nineteenth-Century Music Review , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , April 2017 , pp. 51 - 64
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Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2016 

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References

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