Eduard Hanslick and Ritter Berlioz in Prague: A Documentary Narrative

Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1991. Paper bound, first edition, illustrated, 139pp includes bibliography and index. Very good. 270 grams. In 1846 Hector Berlioz, one of the most revolutionary of composers, gave six concerts in Prague, at that time one of the most musically conservative cities in Europe. Debate raged in the journals and coffee houses over whether Berlioz’s compositions can rightly be considered music at all. Eduard Hanslick, aged twenty and destined to become the most influential music critic of his day, was in the midst of the excitement in Prague over Berlioz. As Geoffrey Payzant’s documentary narrative tells, Hanslick there and then abandoned his youthful romanticism and adopted the formalistic view of the nature of music that characterized his writings for the remainder of his long working life. Geoffrey Payzant is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto; his main area of research is musical aesthetics. Among his publications are the first (and for ten years the only) monograph on Glenn Gould and a new English translation of Eduard Hanslick’s On the Musically Beautiful. All books in stock and available for immediate shipment from Winnipeg, Manitoba.