If only. And yet the endless negations and negotiations of Utopia can be a tedious business. It does not take long for eschatological desire to sink into procrastination; kairos soon dissipates into ennui. Instrumental music was meant to keep the revolutionary vision alive, but for how long can the aesthetic stall the end before it wears itself out and resigns its fate to the everyday? How many cataclysmic cadences does it take to end a Beethoven symphony before music stops ranting and settles down into the comfort of a Biedermeier armchair? Can music go on negating and ironising forever? Can the revolutionary ‘now’ be stretched into infinity without eventually contradicting itself? The problem with an apocalyptic aesthetic is that it cannot last by definition.

Romanticism ends badly. This is the way with apocalyptic narratives: the end is too determinate to have contingency plans; if history stumbles, then music falls with it. And it did not take long for music to register its Utopian failure. Either it withdrew into the mundane world of Biedermeier sensibilities, recoiling with a lyrical regret into miniature forms that erased all apocalyptic pretensions, or it destroyed its own visions of Utopia by subjecting its existence to endless self-critique.