Eduard Hanslick’s On the Beautiful in Music, first published in 1854, was the manifesto of the musical conservatives who believed in the sanctity of absolute music. Hanslick (1825–1904) argued that music could not in its own right express emotions. By this he did not mean that music is incapable of moving the listener, but rather that beauty in music flows from its ability to project "forms animated through sound."

"The nature of beauty in a musical composition is specifically musical. By this we understand a beauty that is independent and in no need of any external content. It is a beauty that lies entirely in the notes and in their artistic interweaving. The meaningful connections of inherently pleasing sounds, their concords and discords, their departure and arrival, their eruption and subsiding—this is what comes before our spiritual perception in free forms and pleases us as beautiful. . . .

"If we now ask what is to be expressed with this musical material, the answer is: Musical Ideas. A complete musical idea is already self-sufficient beauty; it is an end in itself and in no way merely a means or the material for the presentation of emotions or thoughts.

"The sole and exclusive content and object of music are forms animated through sound.

"The manner in which music can bring forth beautiful forms without any particular affective content can be illustrated in a general way by a branch of ornamentation in the visual arts: the arabesque. We take in sweeping lines; at times they dip gently, at times they strive boldly upward; they discover and leave one another; they correspond in their curves large and small, seemingly incommensurable yet always well proportioned. Everywhere there is a welcoming counterpart or pendant, a gathering of small details and yet a whole. Let us contemplate this arabesque not as if it were something dead and static, but rather as something constantly in the process of creating itself before our eyes. How the broad and fine lines surprise the eye at every moment, pursuing one another, raising themselves from small curves to a magnificent height, then sinking again, then expanding, coming together and in ingenious alternation of rest and tension! The image as a whole thus becomes higher and more noble. If we think of this living arabesque as the active emanation of an artistic spirit who ceaselessly pours into the arteries of this motion his fantasy—does not this impression approximate quite closely that of music?. . .

"It is extraordinarily difficult to describe this self-sufficiently beautiful in music, this specifically musical beauty. Because music has no prototype in nature and expresses no conceptual content, it can be discussed only either in dry technical terms or through poetic fictions. Its kingdom is truly "not of this world." All the fantastic descriptions, characterizations, and paraphrases of a musical work are figurative or wrong. What in accounts of every other art is merely descriptive is already metaphorical in music. Music demands to be perceived simply as music; it can be understood and enjoyed only in terms of its own self. . . .

"The concept of "form" is realized in music in an entirely distinctive manner. The forms created out of tones are not empty but full; they are not merely the outlines of a vacuum, but rather a spirit that creates itself from within. In contrast to the arabesque, music is nevertheless in fact an image, albeit one whose object we cannot express through words and comprehend through concepts. In music we find sense and order, but these are musical; music is a language that we speak and understand yet are incapable of translating. That one speaks of "thoughts" in musical works represents a profound insight, and as in speech, a trained judgement easily distinguishes genuine thoughts from empty phrases. In just this way, we recognize the rationally self-contained quality of a group of notes in that we call this grouping a "sentence." We feel precisely where its sense is completed, just as in a logical sentence, even though the truths of the two propositions are entirely incommensurable."

Source: Eduard Hanslick, Vom musikalisch-Schönen (Leipzig: R. Weigel, 1854). Transl. MEB