John Sullivan Dwight

Abstract John Sullivan Dwight (1813–1893) was for much of the nineteenth century America’s leading music critic. Born into a musical family and educated at premier Boston schools, he fell under the spell of New England Transcendentalism and befriended Ralph Waldo Emerson, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Margaret Fuller, George Ripley, and others of a similarly progressive mindset. Dwight resided at the socialist/utopian community of Brook Farm, where he learned about journalism and publishing while writing for The Harbinger. He wrote on many topics—Transcendentalism, of course, but especially music and musical performance. Dwight was a skilled communicator, and he conveyed ideas powerfully, persuasively, and constantly in language that had recently been given verve by German Romanticism and Emersonian Transcendentalism. When Brook Farm collapsed, Dwight’s professional prospects ran desperately low. After several years as a journeyman writer, he launched in 1852 Dwight’s Journal of Music: A Paper of Art and Literature, a newspaper that firmly established him as a serious music critic. The Journal was published regularly until 1881. It was and remains an important periodical. In its own time, it spoke to America’s growing appetite for art music; today it is indispensable for research into nineteenth-century American classical music, especially in Boston. This biography follows Dwight’s life as he meets and writes about some of the era’s most significant intellectuals and musicians. His enormous body of essays, reviews, and translations, much of it illuminated here, leads to the conclusion that Dwight the music critic and Dwight the Transcendentalist are inseparable.