The role of the performer in Hanslick’s On the Musically Beautiful

Abstract

In his On the Musically Beautiful, Hanslick vigorously argued that musical beauty depends neither on the representation nor on the evocation of feelings. However, despite his formalism, Hanslick regards the performance of a musical work as a moment of emotional release. Given the tension between the formalist nature of Hanslick’s general theory and this expressionist drift in his conception of the performer, in this article I pursue two objectives: 1) to argue that there is, in fact, an important internal inconsistency in Hanslick’s theory regarding the nature of performance, and 2) to deepen and render intelligible this perspective of performance. Although internally inconsistent, this perspective, in its search for a synergistic conciliation of the composer’s creativity with the performer’s expressivity, is worthy of analysis.