"Mr. Dwight does not say, what the history of music in this country will
show, that to no one more than to him are we indebted for the intelligent
taste which enjoys the best music. His lectures upon the works of the
great Germans at the time of their performance by the Boston Academy of
Music in the old Odeon forty years ago were a kind of manual for the
intelligent audience. They showed that an elaborate orchestral musical
composition might be as serious a work of art, as full of thought and
passion, and, in a word, of genius, as a great poem, and that no form of
art was more spiritually elevating. They lifted the performance of such
music from the category of mere amusement, and asserted for the authors a
dignity like that of the master poets. If to some hearers the exposition
seemed sometimes fanciful and remote, it was only as all criticism of
works of the imagination often seems so. If the spectator sometimes sees
in a picture more than the painter consciously intended, it is because the
higher power may work with unconscious hands, and because beauty cannot be
hidden from the eye made to see it. Beethoven, for instance, had never a
truer lover or a subtler interpreter than Dwight, and Dwight taught the
teachers, and largely shaped the intelligent appreciation of the
unapproached master.

"Those were memorable evenings at the old Odeon. Francis Beaumont did not
more pleasantly recall the things that he and Ben Jonson had seen done at
the Mermaid than an old Brook Farmer remembers the long walks, eight good
miles in and eight miles out, to see the tall, willowy Schmidt swaying
with his violin at the head of the orchestra, to hear the airy ripple of
Auber's 'Zanetta,' the swift passionate storm of Beethoven's 'Egmont,' the
symphonic murmur of woods and waters and summer fields in the limpid
'Pastorale,' or the solemn grandeur of sustained pathetic human feeling in
the 'Fifth Symphony.' The musical revival was all part of the new birth