Inhalt (‘content’) is so common that it could hardly pass as a technical term. The purpose of this article is to show that from the 18th to the 20th century it was nevertheless used particularly to denote the specifically musical meaning arising from what music ‘contains’ of notes, rhythms, melodic cells, etc. Hegel, Marx, Hauptmann, Hanslick, Schenker, Schoenberg and probably others shared the same view that music has a content of its own, one that cannot be translated in verbal language.