It is perhaps appropriate that the final word should be given to Friedrich Nietzsche. In 1888 he remarked to his friend Carl Fuchs, with whom he had been in correspondence about Riemann's ideas on phrasing: ‘Moral: With your Riemann you are completely on the “right track” – indeed the only one that still exists …’ In the context of Nietzsche's critique of Riemann, whom he called a ‘schoolmaster’ earlier in the same letter, this aphorism must be read with a pinch of salt: the correctness that Nietzsche found in Riemann's views on music was bound up with the corrections that the schoolmaster might demand from his pupils. We have seen how Riemann's normative ideas about music fed into a power struggle between musicological knowledge and compositional production, how the rules of his music-theoretical ideas should ensure that composers would remain in the harmonic ‘Garden of Eden’, at precisely the time when it became apparent that this Garden of Eden was at stake.

The correctness of Riemann's musical thought is not the transcendent truth that Riemann himself aspired to, but one learned by rote and, where necessary, reinforced by the cane administering correction from the lectern of academic authority. (With regard to Riemann's prominent role in the institutional history of musicology, the Foucauldian double meaning of ‘discipline’ would apply to the full in this context.) In this sense, the innocuous adverb ‘still’ becomes the key to Nietzsche's rather sarcastic aphorism.