At the turn of the nineteenth century music became invisible. In fact, the sight of music was so abhorrent to the Romantics that they viciously pulled out the eyes of music so that it would speak with the wisdom of a blind poet. After all, what the Romantics inherited from the aesthetics of Empfindsamkeit was far too soiled and silly for the untrammelled movement of transcendental thought. ‘The realm of poetry is invisible’, they said. So the illustrative potential of music had to be derided as ‘something that only a debased and decadent taste can demand of music; taste of the kind’, says Schelling, ‘that nowadays enjoys the bleating of sheep in Haydn's Creation’. A pictorial music was now regarded as embarrassingly naïve, since it claims to know reality as empirical fact.

The new aesthetic was therefore a kind of purifying agent that cleansed the emotional and pictorial representations that the eighteenth century had for so long smeared into the structures of instrumental music to make it mean something. So whereas in the past instrumental music was forced into imitation, now, under the new regime, it disappeared up the hole of its own empty sign. Instrumental pictures, as found in the symphonies of Dittersdorf, for example, was consigned by E. T. A. Hoffmann ‘to total oblivion as ridiculous aberrations’ to make way for a music that dematerialises into ‘the spirit-realm of the infinite’.