Hanslick, Eduard (1825–1904)

Austrian music critic. He wrote for the Neue freie Presse in Vienna and was a lecturer on music history at the university. A fierce opponent of Wagner's later music and an ardent partisan of Brahms, he argued that the true value of music lay within the formal aesthetics of music itself, not in the expression of extra-musical feelings. His books included Vom Musikalisch-Schönen/Of the Beautiful in Music (1891). In Wagner's original draft for the libretto of Die Meistersinger von Nürnburg/The Mastersingers of Nuremberg the unsympathetic role of Beckmesser was given as Hans Lich.