Stravinsky is a purveyor of shocking comments. Just as he could capture in a single chord the essence of The Rite of Spring, he could frame an aesthetic position with an imminently quotable aperçu: ‘music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all’.1 This remark on the nature of music, published in his 1936 autobiography, is one of his most quoted comments. In fact, it gained enough notoriety to prod Stravinsky to clarify his position some twenty years later, regarding what he called the ‘over-publicized bit about expression (or non-expression)’. Given a chance to repeat himself, he said, he would rephrase the remark; it was not so much that music is ‘powerless to express anything’, he explained, but that ‘music expresses itself’.2 In the first case, music is defined negatively as that which excludes everything but itself; it is not ‘a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature’. In the second case, music is given a positive spin as that which includes itself and nothing else; music is its own expression, ‘beyond verbal meanings and verbal descriptions’. In both cases, the composer is saying the same thing – it just depends whether your aesthetic glass is half full or half empty; music in expressing itself is ‘powerless to express anything’ other than itself. That is why Stravinsky staunchly asserted in 1959 that he still stood by his earlier remark of 1936.

The early Romantics, it is said, formulated the idea of absolute music. If this is so, then its emergence at the close of the eighteenth century was muttered rather than announced by them. In fact, the Romantics were so reticent on the subject that they did not even name absolute music ‘absolute music’; that task was left to Wagner in the 1840s. The Romantics, however, did call instrumental music ‘pure music’, and this can be read as ‘absolute’, for they used the term to imply that instrumental music, as the essence of music, is the spirit of creativity itself. Music is pure poesis, claims Tieck; it is the ‘centre and circumference of all the arts’.

But what did this ‘Romantic music’ sound like to the Romantics? By the time someone like Schumann stylized Romantic philosophy as music, it was too late. When the Schlegel brothers, Novalis, Tieck and Schelling were writing in the late 1790s, Schumann was not even a gleam in his father's eye. There was no ‘Romantic music’ as we know it, only what we call ‘Classical music’. What the Romantics heard were the symphonies of Stamitz or Haydn and they renamed the music as their own. E. T. A. Hoffmann, in his celebrated review of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, simply appropriates Haydn and Mozart as Romantic composers in retrospect.

The idea of absolute music is therefore not ‘Classical’ but ‘Romantic’.