Why should absolute music claim to have no history? Surely such a radical denial already betrays a historical consciousness. Its ahistorical stance is therefore a symptom of history, an allergic reaction for which the only cure is denial. This is not simply the truism that absolute music, like any other object, is governed by the fluctuations of time. Rather, absolute music embodies history itself. It is modern. Indeed, it was called ‘modern music’ at the very time when the French Revolution brought history into crisis and initiated a historical consciousness within German philosophy. Absolute music was therefore born at the time when time itself was under critical scrutiny. If this music is shaped by its context, then its history is about history. But why should it conceal this fact, claiming to transcend history when it lives off the very progress of modernity?

Because human history failed. Or rather, humanity failed to make the future it hoped for. Seventeen eighty-nine turned out to be the catastrophe of history as the ideals of the Revolution collapsed into the barbarity of the Terror. By the end of the eighteenth century, modernity had lost faith in itself; the promises of the Revolution, the progress of technology, the Utopian visions of the Enlightenment were no longer inevitable truths that time would unfold. Rather, history became more contingent and the future less attainable.