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According to philosopher Lydia Goehr, the romantic ideal of the “total work of art” ( Gesamtkunstwerk) paves the way for an “enhanced formalism” providing early formalist claims to autonomy with “a renewed and acceptable contemporary use.” We argue that the species of formalism advocated by Goehr cannot account for the unprecedented sense in which modernist music attains to autonomy. It attains to autonomy, neither by remaining confined within the limits of its own medium (as flat-footed formalism maintains), nor by gesturing toward the extra-musical lying beyond such limits (as enhanced formalism maintains), but by dissolving the very appearance according to which its expressive resources are subject to a priori limitations. The claim to autonomy, at the modernist stage, rests on the emancipation of composition from any preexisting norm.