Eduard Hanslick’s On the Musically Beautiful (1854) constitutes the nemesis of the sentimental-Romantic ‘aesthetics of feeling’. It did not however completely expel emotion from music, as some thought, but from music aesthetics, framed as a new ‘science’ equally removed from historical and political context. This position differed radically from the Left Hegelian politics and Romantic aesthetics Hanslick had espoused a few years earlier. His change of heart was prompted by the revolution of 1848 and the subsequent growth of ‘Herbartianism’, an Austrian ‘state philosophy’ synthesized from the anti-Idealist thinkers J. F. Herbart and Bernard Bolzano. Hanslick’s own Herbartian programme had a direct impact on the Viennese tradition of musicology, and a more indirect influence over late Romantic thought on music, pushing toward a more analytical, ‘objective’ concept of music’s dynamic processes. By World War I, ‘energetic’ aesthetics had replaced Romantic emotions with an unsentimental vocabulary of forms, lines and energy-flows.

This chapter provides a summary of the increasingly independent careers of Johann Strauss (Son) and Eduard up to the death of the former. While Johann focussed on the composition of operettas and one comic opera, with occasional appearances as the director of dance music, Eduard was fully committed to the Strauss Orchestra, in Vienna and internationally (including the United States, Russia and Britain). Johann Strauss became an increasingly celebrated figure in Vienna, notably in 1894 (the fiftieth anniversary of his debut). Eduard, on the other hand, became disillusioned with the city, aggravated by the secret embezzlement of his savings by members of his family.

This chapter offers a focussed look at the music of Johann Strauss (Son), Josef Strauss and Eduard Strauss composed in the 1860s, part of the Gründerzeit period. It deals with stylistic features of the waltz, polka, quadrille and march, performance venues and publication practices, together with their topicality – this including works that honour the Habsburg dynasty, celebrate the burgeoning world of commerce, industry and science, the liberalization of the press, images of old and new Vienna and of the surrounding countryside, physical well-being and the music of other composers.

The modern period (1800–1500) saw important innovations as philosophy of music moved in dramatically different directions. The first innovation was the incorporation of philosophy of music into philosophical systems, either absolute idealist or Marxist. These philosophers also held that music provides important insights into reality. In this stream of philosophy of music are found the seeds of Continental philosophy of music. The other, diametrically opposed, development was the rapid rise of formalist approaches to philosophy of music. These writers stressed the autonomy of musical beauty. A third stream within modern philosophy of music is continuous with earlier thinking about music. It opposed formalism without adopting a grand weltanschauung. Ontology of musical works emerges as a topic for philosophical discussion. Thinkers discussed include Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Wagner, Nietzsche, Ernst Bloch, Adorno, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Nicolai Hartmann, Carroll C. Pratt, Susanne Langer, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Vladimir Jankélévitch, Darwin, Herbert Spencer, Hanslick, Edmund Gurney, Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), R. G. Collingwood and Roman Ingarden.