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As I was in a good temper that evening I found it easy to treat Hanslick as a superficial acquaintance, until he drew me aside for an intimate talk, and with sobs and tears assured me he could not bear to be misunderstood by me any longer.
Hanslick, music, being an art isolated from objective nature, can never be anything but music. Whatever it expresses can only be stated in terms of music; it can never present a definite human "feeling." The essence of music is movement, and it can represent certain dynamic ideas. It can also by analogy suggest in the hearer the ideas of pleasing, soft, violent, elegant, and the like.
My friends all agreed in thinking that Hanslick looked on the whole libretto as a lampoon aimed at himself, and had felt an invitation to the reading to be an insult. And undoubtedly the critic's attitude towards me underwent a very remarkable change from that evening. He became uncompromisingly hostile, with results that were obvious to us at once.
The frequent movement in octaves imparts a nobility and dignity to her expression which are altogether absent in the words. The paraphrase of the words of the air from Gluck's Orphee is amusing enough as a jeu d' esprit, but surely cannot be taken seriously. Hanslick seems to have misapprehended the music; it does not express grief, and is not intended to.
When the score was published those quaint lithographed scores: I believe some of them still exist in the British Museum Schumann got it, and seemed to like it, since he showed it as a treasure to Hanslick, a musical critic of Vienna. Mendelssohn also liked a canon in the second act Mendelssohn, who ought to have understood and loved the picturesque in it better than anyone.
Hanslick in speaking of Chopin. "This composer," he said, "although highly and peculiarly gifted, was never able to unite the fragrant flowers which he scattered by handfuls, into beautiful wreaths." Dr. Hanslick intends this as censure. I regard it as the greatest compliment he could have paid him. A wreath may be very pretty in its way, but it is artificial.
In Vienna the celebrated critic, Hanslick, wrote of him as follows: "There are few violinists whose playing gives such unalloyed enjoyment as the performance of this Spaniard. His tone is incomparable, not powerfully or deeply affecting, but of enchanting sweetness. The infallible correctness of the player contributes greatly to the enjoyment.
Hanslick probably thought this was a suitable moment for being introduced to me in a friendly way as I sat listening on the stage. I greeted him shortly, like a perfectly unknown person; whereupon the tenor, Ander, presented him a second time with the remark that Dr. Hanslick was an old acquaintance. I answered briefly that I remembered Dr.
But almost anything is better than the phlegm that says, "The old ways are good enough for all time;" and the Bohemian missionary must always hold a place in the chronicle of American music. The suite, which has been played frequently abroad, winning the praises of Hanslick, Nicodé, and Rubinstein, is scored for string orchestra.
It is to Hanslick that we owe the general summing up of these possibilities of expression as "the dynamic figures of occurrences." How this dynamic skeleton is filled out through association, or that special form of association which we know as direct induction, is not hard to understand on psychological grounds.
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