Eduard Hanslick has rarely had it so good. A year after a volume entitled Rethinking Hanslick (an appellation normally reserved for canonic composers rather than their critics) appeared from University of Rochester Press, the nineteenth-century aesthetician finds himself once more centre stage in Mark Evan Bonds’s latest monograph.Footnote ¹ It would appear that the Prague-born Viennese critic is all the talk of the town – at least the English-speaking quarter. Such reconsideration of this crucial and often superficially understood figure is long overdue. And in the same spirit that holds that Absolute Music is often more easily defined through what it is not that what it actually is, there is a fitting irony that the title of this present book comes not from Hanslick but from his notorious adversary, Richard Wagner.

For Absolute Music is most fundamentally a book about Hanslick’s landmark 1854 treatise Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, and the mid-century debates that both provoked it and in turn it provoked. Despite the subtitle ‘the History of an Idea’, the ‘essence’ of this study (to use a term much used by Bonds throughout) is found in the aesthetic revolution that the author sees articulated by Hanslick’s supposedly conservative tract. The enormous historical sweep of Bonds’s account, stretching from ancient myth to Cold War politicking, finds its spiritual centre in this most urbane of music critics.

The qualities expected of a scholar of Bonds’s calibre are readily in evidence throughout. Anything from this author is worthwhile reading, and this book is no exception. The style is clear, the unfolding of the argument lucid, and the detail often exacting.Footnote ² Bonds’s learning is prodigious and often – though never ostentatiously – on display. At times earlier sections of this book read like a roll call of every thinker who has had something to say on music since antiquity. Holding in his introduction that ‘the history of the idea of absolute has never been adequately documented’ (p. 13), Bonds often appears eager to make good on this alleged shortcoming with the wealth of historical sources he provides, especially in relation to music aesthetics up to the early modern period and around his mid-nineteenth-century focal point. But the reader expecting a comprehensive account of what is normally gathered under the term ‘absolute music’ might nevertheless be surprised at some of the areas passed over with minimal ceremony.

Bonds’s study is organized in three parts, around the historical centre the author locates at 1850. Although the book is nominally split into three parts – Antiquity to 1550, 1550 to 1850, and 1850 to 1945 – the first of these sections is extremely brief, and since the first three chapters of the third section (on Wagner, Hanslick and Liszt respectively) take up virtually the middle third of the volume, the effect is of a central nave formed around this unlikely trinity, with music history pre- and post-1850 forming subsidiary aisles. And within this central arch, the chapter on Hanslick occupies 70 pages of the total 90 (with an Appendix charting the early reception of his famous tract thrown in for good measure). There is thus a sense that this book is in essence an extended article on Hanslick, which has necessarily grown out to encompass the longer history of aesthetics in order to demonstrate Bonds’s thesis on the crucial, paradigm-changing impact of Vom Musikalisch-Schönen.

The book’s stated aim is to trace ‘the history of the idea of music’s essence as autonomous, self-contained, and wholly self-referential’ (p. 1), a notion of music which the author admits could also be called ‘pure’ as Hanslick in fact preferred, rather than Wagner’s term ‘absolute’ (p. 7). Bonds’s basic thesis presents a novel perspective, in that his crucial terms for discussion are the relationship perceived (or not) by successive generations between music’s essence and its effect. In short, his contention is that Hanslick’s separation of music’s capacity to invoke emotions – its effect – from its fundamental nature – its essence – signified a drastic step in the history of music aesthetics: ‘at no point in the earlier history of aesthetics had anyone ever thought to cordon off the two so profoundly’ Bonds remarks (p. 9).Footnote ³ Thus, despite the seemingly conservative image he did little to dispel (cf. pp. 157–72), Hanslick, and not Wagner, emerges as the true musical-aesthetic revolutionary here.

One of the other novel touches of Bonds’s account is to emphasize the commonalities between the apostrophizing of instrumental music in German thought around the start of the nineteenth century and earlier, often ancient views (John Neubauer had gone some way towards this viewpoint several decades before, but dealt primarily with Pythagorean and Platonic notions of celestial proportion rather than the wider range of features Bonds isolates).Footnote ⁴ While many accounts of absolute music see an aesthetic paradigm shift occurring over the second half of the eighteenth century leading to the complete revaluation of instrumental music by German Romantic authors around 1800, Bonds seeks rather to show that many of the elements seized upon by Wackenroder, Friedrich Schlegel, Hoffmann et al were already present in some form earlier. Refreshing though this perspective is, one might still think that it undervalues the differences here between the early nineteenth century and previous aesthetic views.Footnote ⁵ It is noteworthy, for instance, that the five terms Bonds uses to define music aesthetics from 1550 to 1850 – Expression, Beauty, Form, Autonomy and Disclosiveness – are not all equally present across this period, but the latter three assume far greater prominence in Bonds’s account across the second half of the eighteenth century. In his urge to set off Hanslick’s contribution, Bonds arguably minimizes some significant changes that had occurred in the century prior to his appearance.

Absolute Music, as Bonds makes clear, is a concept, not a thing: his book’s subtitle is pointedly the history of an idea. This distinction features in his introduction, where earlier authors such as Carl Dahlhaus, Roger Scruton and Daniel Chua who have dealt with this topic are summarily dismissed for their inadvertent reifying of absolute music from a mode of listening and reception into an actual object, Bonds calling upon A.N. Whitehead’s ‘Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness’ for authority.Footnote ⁶ Whitehead’s complaint is in fact hardly new: variants of this idea have routinely been issued by English philosophers against continental thinkers since the early modern period. We could have gone back to Locke’s argument against the abuse of words denoting abstract concepts, even to Hobbes’s ‘insignificant sounds’ and Bacon’s ‘idols of the marketplace’.Footnote ⁷ This is, in other words, a very Anglo-Saxon position to take. Nevertheless, I feel the neutral observer should demur slightly here: despite the common-sense appeal of Bonds’s charge, such a dismissal is in danger of overlooking important differences in the way cultures and philosophic traditions view the relation of words and things, concepts and reality. Adopting such an attitude would not lead us very far attempting to understand a thinker such as Hegel (tempting though it often is to give up in exasperation faced with someone of his ilk), and the relation of writers such as Dahlhaus to this intellectual tradition has been well documented. Thus while Bonds’s point may seem uncontroversial and self-evident to many of us from the Anglo-American sphere, this distinction is not universal but reflects another way of viewing reality as constructed through language. And since most of the musical repertoire perceived as ‘absolute’ is German, the German intellectual tradition might be granted a little more room here. It is also not clear that this shortcut is genuinely debilitating for the arguments such writers make. It is understandable that an author needs to clear some ground to stake out his or her own territory, but the positioning here at the start could be more generous to earlier scholars. Bonds has his own slant on this topic – with his own omissions and individual interpretation of the history of music aesthetics – and as such has no need to worry about the competition.

In his emphasis on the idea rather than the supposed musical object, one might also think that the author on several occasions overlooks an important source for discussing absolute music – the views (if not the works) of composers. This lacuna (if such it is) becomes particularly apparent in dealing with the first half of the nineteenth century. Stemming perhaps from Bonds retelling of aesthetic history to minimize the profound rupture earlier writers have perceived in music aesthetics around 1800 in Germany, narrative emphasis is placed squarely on the highly politicized squabbling around 1850. But in the process some of the context for this debacle is missed. Bonds rightly points out that the idea of programme music promulgated by Liszt and Brendel was hardly new; at best (reworking a formulation of Richard Kaplan), we might say that Liszt invented a new name for an old genre, just as ‘Absolute Music’ (a music claiming to be ‘without a history’ as Chua observes) pre-existed Wagner’s coinage of the term in 1846. Yet the work Liszt’s propaganda piece is supposedly about – Harold in Italy – and more significantly, its composer, Berlioz, and his views on the relation between music and programme, are not really considered. Schumann’s famous rejection of Berlioz’s programme is mentioned, but almost in passing, and this composer’s own extremely significant (and influential) engagement with musical meaning and verbal articulation is treated with extreme brevity. Mendelssohn, despite his characteristic reticence about expressing musical meaning verbally, seems to have held a musical aesthetic distinct from Hanslick in its incorporation of feeling but just as uncompromisingly ‘pure’ in its distrust of words. Even Chopin, in his Ballades and their reception, encapsulates some of the tension between musical purity and programmatic paratext familiar to the late nineteenth century.

Admittedly, Bonds’s stated interest is in the narrower notion of absolute music as something akin to a wholly self-referential, abstract art, a formalist ‘pure music’, not with the wider debates concerning music, language and meaning, or music as cosmic revelation (Dahlhaus’s other, rather useful, definition of ‘absolute music’). But it is hard to isolate these varied and often entangled meanings, especially given that elements in Hanslick and Wagner specifically implicate these broader questions, and that within the first 100 or so pages, Bonds has been happy to consider these wider implications of the term. However similar much of the music of the future might have been to that of the past, and however much the radical aesthetic of the New Germans was in important respects deeply retrogressive, Wagner, Brendel, Liszt and the New German School were seeking to set themselves in opposition to earlier music, composers and aesthetic views as well as to Vormärz politics.Footnote ⁸ The period 1800–1850 thus gets rather short shrift in the present account. Moreover, important thinkers and theorists from this period are also arguably underrepresented: A.B. Marx, that ideal prophet of the absolute, receives slight consideration, and Schopenhauer only appears as a post-Wagnerian phenomenon (a feature which, as Dahlhaus would say, might reflect the reality of reception history, but nevertheless misrepresents the history of ideas). Thus Bonds’s book complements rather than subsumes and supersedes earlier scholarship – Dahlhaus, who despite his endless dialectical convolutions and lamentable tendency to reification deals selectively but insightfully with the nineteenth century as a whole, Chua, who has much to say from Monteverdi up to Beethoven but not much after. After Hanslick, composers and their views are generally drawn into Bonds’s discussion, though the story told is a familiar one by now from previous literature.

Such quibbles – and I have focused more in the latter stages of this review on what appear to me as the slight lacunae or missed opportunities rather than repeatedly praising the manifold qualities of this book – should not detract from the enormous value of Bonds’s scholarship and his achievement here. Absolute Music is an important work by one of our leading musicologists, and it is hard to think of another scholar who could have carried out a more perceptive or clearer-headed historical analysis of this concept. Bonds’s work does not replace all previous writings on the subject, but his is in many cases the most detailed and richly documented account of this idea and forms an indispensible account to go alongside – supplement, sometimes dispute and correct – the best of these.