 The art of music occupies a central place in Arthur Schopenhauer’s (1788–1860) philosophical system, with which it is inextricably linked. A brief overview of Schopenhauer’s system is thus in order. He accepts the Kantian distinction between the world as it is in itself and as it appears to us, but rejects Kant’s claim that we cannot know reality as it is independently from its phenomenal manifestation. As representing subjects, our knowledge is bound by what Schopenhauer terms principium individuationis, which orders representations according to a spatio-temporal structure and determines causal relationships between them. Objects are thus given to us in a mediated fashion, as representations. But one object is given to us as experiencing subjects both in a mediated and in an unmediated fashion. This is our own body, which is experienced both from the outside, as a representation, and from the inside, as an incessant succession of drives and impulses. Schopenhauer claims that this reveals the fundamental noumenal essence of the world as Will. Since the Will is endless striving and desiring, and since desiring and striving are by nature sources of pain, the world is essentially characterized by suffering. Additionally, Schopenhauer claims that the Will objectifies itself in the world through a set of Platonic Ideas, which exist beyond the principium individuationis, and are ranked according to the degree in which the Will is objectivized in them.