While considerably less explored than his controversy with Wagner, Hanslick’s relation to Hegel is also interesting. Hegel’s claim regarding music’s ability to express subjective life surely falls within the scope of the negative argument laid out in On the Musically Beautiful. However, Hanslick makes a characteristically Hegelian move when he holds that musical form is music’s content. This is not a gratuitously paradoxical formulation, but rather bears the mark of Hegel’s conception of beauty