 The nineteenth century witnessed the first explicit vindications of absolute music as an aesthetic ideal (for a history of this concept, see Dahlhaus 1978 [1989], Pederson 2009, and Bonds 2014). The term was first used in 1846 by Wagner, who then employed it pejoratively in his 1849–51 writings in order to refer to music lacking any essential social function—in this sense, music is absolute insofar as it is socially autonomous (on Wagner’s uses of “absolute music”, see Grey 1995: 2; Chua 1999: 225; Pederson 2009: 241–245; Bonds 2014: 134 ff.). Wagner’s opponents appropriated the term in this second sense, to denote music that is not accompanied by a text, program, or other conceptual prompts. In this sense, the symphony was considered the paradigmatic example of absolute music (see Dahlhaus 1978 [1989: 10–11]). Absolute music is thus purely instrumental music—this is also how the expression is typically used today. The concept of absolute music may be used in a purely descriptive fashion: it denotes a subset of all musical works. However, nineteenth century aesthetics often adopted a normative view of absolute music as purely instrumental music. The view holds that music’s value is irreducible to that of other art forms, and that instrumental music is valuable for its formal properties, rather than for any content it may disclose (if it can do so in the first place), or feelings it may arouse. This is musical formalism.