When John Sullivan Dwight (1813-1893) founded the influential Dwight's Journal of Music in 1852, his reputation as the first major American critic of art music was firmly established. Yet the importance of Dwight's early career, especially his key role in introducing Ludwig van Beethoven's symphonies to a musically unsophisticated American public, has been largely obscured by the musical and social conservatism of his later writings.

This copiously documented work focuses on Dwight's formative years, exploring his progressive championship of Beethoven's symphonies in America and examining his development of a higher music criticism.

Ora Frishberg Saloman carefully analyzes a full range of Dwight's published and unpublished writings from 1835 to 1846 to investigate thoroughly the connection between Dwight's early interpretive commentary about Beethoven's music and his expanding knowledge of various European musical, literary, and critical sources, including Friedrich Schiller, Thomas Carlyle, A. B. Marx, William Gardiner, H. Theodor Hach, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Charles Fourier.