 Richard Wagner claimed that there was musical sublimity in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and that was its great innovation, to take us beyond the merely musically-beautiful to the sublime (Wagner 1870, contrast Hanslick 1950, 1986. Many musicologists follow Wagner, (such as Richard Taruskin [1989, forthcoming]). But on that view, where sublimity is associated with danger and extremity, it is not clear that we have a plausible story of why people seek out the sublime in music. Is it a kind of thrill-seeking, like fairground rides or rock climbing, where people believe themselves to be in danger or at least cannot help imagining that they are? Is their experience of Beethoven’s Ninth mixed with pain in this way? This seems unlikely. Pain and fear have natural expressions on the human face, but the human faces of the audience listening to Beethoven’s Ninth is not noticeably different from the human faces listening to Mozart, Chopin or Tchaikovsky. Their faces are unlike those of those on fairground rides or rock climbers who have to make difficult moves. Furthermore, the audience of the Ninth are not motivated to flee from the concert hall. Do they have to be strapped into their seats to prevent escape as on a fairground ride? By contrast, on the substantive view of the sublime as a kind of beauty, there is a distinctive kind of pleasure that characterizes the experience of the sublime, on which judgments of the sublime are based. It is an intense pleasure, to be sure. But intensity does not entail a mixture with pain.