The earliest public use of the pejorative German term Zukunftsmusik seems to date from 1853, when the music teacher and essayist Friedrich Wieck, Clara Schumann's father, used in it three new chapters (written 1852) for his collection of essays Clavier und Gesang.
In 1854 a Viennese critic, L. A. Zellner, used it in respect of the music of both Wagner and Robert Schumann; it was also used that year by the composer Louis Spohr.
It began to be used in a specifically pejorative sense against Wagner by the editor Ludwig Bischoff, an associate of the conservative Ferdinand Hiller.
Typically, this term was used in connection with the aesthetic aims of the circle of artists around Franz Liszt in Weimar, among them Joachim Raff, Hans von Bülow, Peter Cornelius, Rudolph Viole, Felix Draeseke, Alexander Ritter and others.
He also performed works by other contemporary composers, among them Robert Schumann, Ferdinand Hiller, Hector Berlioz, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Anton Rubinstein, Eduard Sobolewski and Giuseppe Verdi.
Occasionally, Schumann was regarded as a representative of that school, and there are even examples where Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy was called its originator.
He received a letter from Wagner, written from Venice on December 31, 1858, stating that the Weimarians with their idealistic talk about art should leave him alone.
In his letter Wagner disclaimed the use of this formulaic term, attributing it to his enemies Hiller and Bischoff, and asserted the principles he had set out in his essay The Artwork of the Future.
It was intended as a preface to a book of French translations of some of Wagner's libretti, including Tannhäuser and Tristan und Isolde.
Wagner's intention was doubtless to familiarise the Parisian public with his ideas on music and opera in advance of performances there which he hoped would secure his fame and fortune; 'a lucid exposition of my thoughts would dispel such prejudice and error'.
[17] Obsession with florid operatic melody is trivial: 'The poet's greatness is mostly to be measured by what he leaves unsaid, letting us breathe in silence to ourselves the thing unspeakable; the musician it is who brings this untold mystery to clarion tongue, and the impeccable form of his sounding silence is endless melody '.
[18] Wagner concedes that "even in the feebler works of frivolous composers [i.e. his former mentor Meyerbeer], I have met with isolated effects that made me marvel at the incomparable might of Music.
"In these [...] points you might find the most valid definition of my 'innovations', but by no means in an absolute-musical caprice such as people have thought fit to foist upon me under the name of the 'Music of the Future'.