Music dies beautifully because Hanslick's definition of absolute music is grounded in the formalism of Kant's aesthetic of the beautiful. Music, he writes, is the ‘self-subsistent form of the beautiful’ rather than the formless power of the Kantian sublime; it exhibits what Kant calls a ‘finality of form’, where the means have no end other than in themselves, so that there is ‘no distinction’, says Hanslick, ‘between substance and form’; they simply coincide without remainder, leaving nothing ‘outside the work’ for critical leverage. Thus music in essence is only the score, shut off from the kind of sublime disruption that might shatter the form to leave music susceptible to the historical, political and emotional impurities that Wagner wanted to smear over its structure. So by enclosing music in itself, Hanslick overcomes Wagner's dialectical history by simply erasing history from absolute music. Any work prone to Wagner's intentions is therefore a mistake. This is why for Hanslick, the finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is not a light for the future but a monstrous deformation that casts a ‘giant shadow’ over an otherwise promising symphony; it is an ugly head attached to a beautiful body.

Beauty, for Hanslick, is a question of essence. Music may evoke emotions, but such emotions cannot define its being; it may gather the intellectual trappings of history, but these meanings are not essential but extraneous to the ‘intrinsic beauty’ of music. To prove this, Hanslick resorts to the technical purity of structural analysis.