Robert Hirschfeld (1857–1914). Austrian music critic and historian. He completed a PhD at University of Vienna in 1884 with a dissertation on the 14th-century music theorist Johannes de Muris, and in the same year launched a series of concerts of Renaissance music in Vienna; when his former teacher Eduard Hanslick ridiculed these, he attacked him in a pamphlet ( Das kritische Verfahren E. Hanslicks ) of 1885. Hirschfeld was also sympathetic to Wagner. From 1893/94, he was editor of the periodical Wiener Philharmoniker: philharmonische Concerte, and wrote reviews for, among other journals, the Illustriertes Wiener Extrablatt, the Wiener Abendpost, the Neue Musikalische Presse, and the Österreichische Rundschau. He was particularly hostile to Mahler, as conductor, director of the Hofoper, and symphonist. With Richard Perger, he wrote a history of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (1912). There is no known correspondence between Hirschfeld and Schenker. However Hirschfeld is mentioned in Schenker’s diary, which shows him frequently in animated discussion, and even “controversy,” with Schenker, and is referred to quite often in his letters to others, including: OJ 1/4, p.10 : December 22, 1902 : diary ( NGDM2; Baker’s 1971; Federhofer, Nach Tagebüchern; other sources) (See Leon Botstein, Music and Its Public: Habits of Listening and the Crisis of Modernism in Vienna, 1870-1914 (PhD diss.: Harvard University, 1985).) |
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| Robert Hirschfeld (1857–1914). Austrian music critic and historian. He completed a PhD at University of Vienna in 1884 with a dissertation on the 14th-century music theorist Johannes de Muris, and in the same year launched a series of concerts of... | |