How did Eduard Hanslick’s book The Beautiful in Music challenge Romantic ideas about music?

Eduard Hanslick’s The Beautiful in Music (1854) fundamentally challenged the prevailing Romantic aesthetic by rejecting the era's focus on descriptive, emotional, and literary expression in music.12

While Romantic composers like Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner often viewed music as an embodiment of poetic or extramusical ideas, Hanslick advocated for musical autonomy. His key challenges to Romanticism included:23

• Formalism vs. Expressionism: Hanslick argued that music is an art of intrinsic principles and "forms in motion," rather than a vehicle for communicating specific human emotions or literary narratives.423
• Rejection of Descriptive Criticism: He criticized the "purple prose" of Romantic critics, noting that such descriptive writing is redundant if the music is known and meaningless if it is not.2
• Independence of Art: He asserted that music is independent of the other arts, directly contradicting the Romantic tendency to link music with poetry, legends, and folk tales.52

By shifting the focus toward analysis and structure, Hanslick is widely regarded as the father of modern musical criticism, effectively ending the "age of description".2