Word: wagnerism
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...feared music critic of his day (1825-1904), and one of the most justly renowned of all time. Writing for the last 30 years of his career in Die Neue Freie Presse, he had contemporary subjects worthy of his talents: Franz Liszt, Clara Schumann, Anton Rubinstein, Joseph Joachim, Richard Wagner, Johannes Brahms and Giuseppe Verdi. A trained musician and respectable pianist himself, Critic Hanslick was sometimes caustic, but he was always careful. His claim was that "I never criticized a composition that I had not read or played through, both before and after the performance...
...compositions, but not an outpouring of a magnificent personality . . . Everything is distinct, clear, sharp as a pencil sketch." But if Hanslick had never written a word about any other musician, his place in musical history would still be secure as the sharpest thorn in the sensitive flesh of Richard Wagner...
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...
...proceeded to drop 39 singers, including hitherto sacrosanct Heldentenor Lauritz Melchior, 60, whose wanderings from the score had been the bane of Met conductors for years. There were wild charges that Manager Bing, Vienna-born and German-trained, would try to force even more of the heavy dumpling of Wagner down the throats of audiences that are notably partial to lighter Italian and French fare. (Actually, Bing has little enthusiasm for Wagner.) When he signed famed Soprano Kirsten Flagstad to appear at the Met for the first time since she left it in 1941 to go to her husband...