120 PART 1 | FROM COLONIZATION THROUGH THE CIVIL WAR
two violins, viola, and cello), duo sonatas for violin and piano, and solo sonatas
for piano alone.
In the hands of these masters, the sonata exemplifi ed composers’ music: a
serious, discursive form, whose themes were presented, repeated, and devel-
oped to create a large musical structure. A growing appreciation of its artistic
substance in Europe after 1800 eventually carried over to the United States. In
the early 1800s, however, classical instrumental music was still new to America,
and it posed diffi culties for performers and listeners alike.
By the 1830s a few American musicians and writers were starting to rec-
ognize Beethoven (who died in 1827) as a master. But before Americans could
embrace Beethoven’s works, there needed to be audience interest as well as a
framework to support their performance. The way Bostonians overcame these
obstacles may be shown by tracing the path that led to the fi rst performance of
Beethoven’s First Symphony there in 1841.
One leader in the effort was John Sullivan Dwight (later the city’s foremost
music critic), an ardent music lover whose interest in philosophy combined
with a passion for German poetry. In 1838 he published an English translation
of poems by Goethe and Schiller, fi nding in their work a spiritual quality that
convinced him “how life, and thought, and poetry, and beauty, are the inherit-
ance of [humankind], and not of any class, or age, or nation.” Dwight also saw
certain musical works as universal. By 1837 he was convinced that Beethoven was
a thinker on a par with Socrates, Shakespeare, and Newton. And he found in
instrumental music “a language of feeling” that had reached its peak in works
for orchestra. In 1841 Dwight described Beethoven’s slow movements as uniquely
eloquent music that was able “to hallow pleasure, and to naturalize religion.”
With such pronouncements, Dwight helped pave the way for regular perfor-
mances of classical instrumental music.
Institutional support came fi rst from the Boston Academy of Music.
Founded in 1833 to teach singing, the academy boasted Lowell Mason as its
fi rst professor. Its activities soon caught on with the public, and revenues from
membership dues, classes for children and adults, and contributions were
enough by 1835 to refurbish a local theater, supply it with a new organ, and set
up the academy’s headquarters there. An instrumentalist was hired to teach
instrumental music, and singing instruction then became merely
one stage in a farther-reaching project to enrich and diver-
sify Boston’s musical life. At the end of the decade an orchestra
was assembled, and it was this orchestra of the Boston Academy
of Music that gave the local premiere on February 13, 1841, of
Beethoven’s First Symphony.
The concert seems to have created no particular stir, but other
orchestra performances followed. In 1842 a local newspaper
reported that only a few years earlier the music of Haydn, Mozart,
and Beethoven “would hardly have drawn an audience of fi fty per-
sons. Now, we see the hall fi lled an hour before the commence-
ment of the performances... which speaks well for the increase
of correct musical taste in our good city.” The same article praised
the Academy of Music’s role in bringing about “this great revolu-
tion in musical taste.” The academy’s annual report for 1843 even
suggested a link with personal virtue. Calling classical orchestralK John Sullivan Dwight
(1813–1893), a member of
Harvard College’s class of
1832 and an 1836 graduate
of Harvard’s Divinity
School, became Boston’s
leading writer on music with
the founding of Dwight’s
Journal of Music, which
he edited from 1852 until
18 81.performances of
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