Composers Datebook

Today’s date marks the anniversary Richard Wagner’s birth in 1813. During Wagner’s lifetime, his most famous—and perhaps most perceptive—critic was a Prague-born Viennese writer on music named Eduard Hanslick. Hanslick knew Wagner personally, and described him as follows: “A stranger would have seen in his face not so much an artistic genius as a dry Leipzig professor or lawyer. He spoke incredibly much—and fast—in a monotonous sing-song Saxon dialect and always of himself, his works, his reforms, his plans. If he mentioned the name of another composer it was always in a tone of disparagement.” For Wagnerians, Hanslick was a crusty old conservative who preferred Brahms and was too thick-headed to appreciate the “Music of the Future” epitomized by Wagner’s operas. But if one actually reads Hanslick’s writings on Wagner, a more nuanced and balanced picture emerges. “I know very well,” wrote Hanslick, “that Wagner is the greatest living opera composer and the only one in Germany worth talking about in a historical sense … But between this admission and the repulsive idolatry which has grown up in connection with Wagner and which he has encouraged, there is an infinite chasm.” Upon learning of Wagner’s death in 1883, Hanslick wrote: “Wagner stands at the head of the moving forces of modern art. He shook opera and all its associated theoretical and practical issues from a comfortable state of repose bordering on stagnation.”