It is a common assumption that Hanslick was the main spokesperson for “absolute music.” My research shows that Hanslick did not come to be associated with the term until towards the end of the nineteenth century. Around 1880, polemics about Liszt’s concept of program music used “absolute music” to designate program music’s opposite. But just as absolute music was becoming firmly linked to Hanslick, Brahms, and Dvorák around 1900, Wagnerian writers hijacked the term to refer to Bruckner.