Articles
Max Kalbeck and Eduard Hanslick. A reconstruction of the common aesthetic assumptions in relation to music
The submitted article introduces the reader to the figure of Max Kalbeck, a music critic who was born in Breslau of Silesia and whose work flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Kalbeck spent most of his life in Vienna, where he was a music reviewer for the most important journals. This paper attributes Kalbeck’s critical creativity to a debate over the music theory, which took place in the German-speaking area. The debate was a polemic of two conflicting trends: neo-romantic and positivist and boiled down to a dispute over music piece’s content and form and the issue of separation or fusion of individual arts. The submitted article presents the aesthetic assumptions of Kalbeck in the light of that dispute and assigns them to a formal trend in the aesthetics of music. The main theme of the article is the music theory of the Austrian musicologist Eduard Hanslick, which is a key to the understanding of Kalbeck’s career and aesthetic assumptions.