What is Eduard Hanslick?
[[File:Hanslick.jpg|200px|right|thumb|Portrait of Eduard Hanslick, 40 years old]] '''Eduard Hanslick''' (born [[Prague]] September 11, 1825; died [[Baden]], [[Austria]], August 6, 1904) was a famous [[music critic]]. He wrote about music that was being [[Composition (music)|composed]] in his time. He liked the [[music]] of composers like [[Johannes Brahms|Brahms]] and [[Robert Schumann|Schumann]] but hated the music of [[Richard Wagner|Wagner]] and [[Franz Liszt|Liszt]]. Their music sounded too modern for his taste. He was born into a [[German language|German]]-speaking family. His father was a music teacher. When he was 18 Hanslick went to study music with [[Václav Tomášek|Tomášek]], one of Prague's most important [[musician]]s. He also studied [[law]] at [[Prague University]]. He did not study music at university but he knew a lot about music and played the [[piano]] very well. He started writing music reviews (writing about [[concert]]s that had taken place). For many years he wrote reviews in a paper called ''Neue freie Presse''. He became [[professor]] of [[history]] and music at the [[University of Vienna]] and was an [[adjudicator]] at lots of [[music festival]]s. His most famous book was called ''Vom Musikalisch-Schönen'' (''About Beauty in Music''). Hanslick's tastes were [[conservatism|conservative]] (he did not like new ideas). We remember him today for writing good things about Brahms and bad things about Wagner. A lot of musicians took sides on this matter. It is sometimes called: ''The War of the Romantics''. Musicians had long arguments in the music journals about which kind of music was better. Although in some ways he was narrow-minded he had a lot of [[influence]] on music. His books on music are very interesting showing great knowledge. He knew most of the great musicians of his day. Wagner made a [[caricature]] of Hanslick in his opera ''[[Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg]]'' in which the town clerk Beckmesser [[critic]]izes the young singer Walther who sings songs which brea