The Prelude to Tristan and Isolde reminds me of the old Italian painting of a martyr whose intestines are slowly unwound from his body on a reel.

- Eduard Hanslick

Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto gives us for the first time the hideous notion that there can be music that stinks to the ear.

- Eduard Hanslick

That the sweetly intoxicating three-four rhythm which took hold of hand & foot, necessarily eclipsed great & serious music & made the audience unfit …

- Eduard Hanslick

Music has no subject beyond the combinations of notes we hear, for music speaks not only by means of sounds, it speaks nothing but sound.

- Eduard Hanslick

An art aims, above all, at producing something beautiful which affects not our feelings but the organ of pure contemplation, our imagination.

- Eduard Hanslick

The beautiful is and remains beautiful though it arouse no emotion whatever, and though there be no one to look at it. In other words, although the b…

- Eduard Hanslick

Grant that the true organ with which the beautiful is apprehended is the imagination, and it follows that all arts are likely to affect the feelings …

- Eduard Hanslick

The course hitherto pursued in musical aesthetics has nearly always been hampered by the false assumption that the object was not so much to inquire …

- Eduard Hanslick

On the one hand it is said that the aim and object of music is to excite emotions, i.e., pleasurable emotions; on the other hand, the emotions are sa…

- Eduard Hanslick