Word: hanslick
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Soprano Ingrid Bjoner was generally first rate as a shyly aggressive Eva. Bass Karl Doench was appropriately repellent as Beckmesser, the malevolent town clerk whom Wagner created as a caricature of one of his most caustic critics-Viennese Music Critic Eduard Hanslick. The chorus and extras were drilled with spectacular precision, creating at the end of Act II one of the most convincing pillow-throwing, hair-pulling riots a Met Meistersinger has ever seen...
...music critics are remembered at all by posterity, it is usually for having been notably wrong in their judgments. A case in point: Eduard Hanslick (1825-1904), 19th century Europe's most renowned and most recalcitrant critic, who for 40 years mercilessly shredded Wagnerian operas, won painful immortality when Wagner wrote him into Meistersinger as the waspish Beckmesser. But perhaps the most remarkable music critic of all time, a man who later made his mark in wider literary fields, was George Bernard Shaw. A new selection from his weekly criticisms for London's The Star and The World...
...product is far more vital. There is already a dangerous tendency today to lavish all on performers and to regard new composers as intruders in a well established game. It is significant that, without exception, every one of the greater music critics--such as Rellstab, Hoffman, Heine, Schumann, Hanslick and G. B. Shaw--owes that greatness almost exclusively to what he wrote about the composer and his music, not about the performance. Be this as it may, when the CRIMSON reviewer referred to Beethoven's "middle period" (Oct. 5), he was making an astute comment, and concerning performance at that...
Fatal Potion. As late as Tannhäuser (1845), Hanslick considered Wagner "the greatest dramatic talent among all contemporary composers." But with Lohengrin, and Wagner's pronouncements about his "music of the future," Hanslick became disenchanted. He could not stomach Wagner's "exclusion of the purely human factor in favor of gods, giants, dwarfs, and their various magic arts." To Hanslick, drama should "present us with real characters, persons of flesh and blood, whose fate is determined by their own passions and decisions." He complained that even in Tristan the two principal characters are "governed by a chemical...
...Hanslick began to find Wagner "neither a great musician nor a great poet. He can be called at best . . . a decorative genius." His instrumentation, the critic wrote, "with its clever use of tone colors and its elastic application to the text . . . is what makes Wagner's music seem dazzlingly new, exotic and fabulous, and completely acceptable to many listeners as a substitute for real music...