Almost as soon as the concept was born, absolute music died. The remainder of this book is an autopsy devoted to the many deaths that instrumental music suffered, faked and inflicted. Some of these deaths were quite spectacular, others more pitiful, but they were all necessary in the economy of the aesthetic. Absolute music's survival is predicated on its death. After all, as the Romantics insisted, the absolute can only be known negatively: one dies to enter eternity.

The last rites of the aesthetic were a kind of surrogate salvation for the secular man. By the turn of the nineteenth century, the fear that God had died gave rise to the equally terrifying fear of dying without God; not only was humanity left to manufacture its own meaning in a material world, but the very thought of its extinction threatened to bring whatever meaning it discovered into crisis. One way of overcoming this situation was for humanity to aestheticise death in the hollow of the empty sign; the nothingness of absolute music resonated with the fatal promise of life beyond a God-forsaken world. To die in absolute music is to know the promise of eternal life without a Christian burial.