Eduard Hanslick

Eduard Hanslick
Portrait of Hanslick, published in 1894
Born	(1825-09-11)11 September 1825 Prague, Austrian Empire
Died	6 August 1904(1904-08-06) (aged 78) Baden, Austria
Occupations	Music critic aesthetician historian

Eduard Hanslick (11 September 1825 – 6 August 1904) was an Austrian music critic, aesthetician and historian.^[1] Among the leading critics of his time, he was the chief music critic of the Neue Freie Presse from 1864 until the end of his life. His best known work, the 1854 treatise Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (On the Musically Beautiful), was a landmark in the aesthetics of music and outlines much of his artistic and philosophical beliefs on music.^[2]

Hanslick was a conservative critic and championed absolute music over programmatic music for much of his career.^[3] As such, he sided with and promoted the faction of Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms in the so-called "War of the Romantics", often deriding the works of composers such as Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner.