“The first mature European musician of high distinction and versatility to acquire a permanent residence in New York and to decide to make his future career in America was Dr. Leopold Damrosch,” recalls Edwin Rice in his article in The Musical Quarterly, published fifty-eight years after Damrosch's death. Rice is perhaps not an impartial judge: an amateur chorister remembering his conductor, he focuses his recollections on the repertory Damrosch performed with the Oratorio Society of New York. Still, his statement is easy to agree with if we accept both of his qualifications: residence in New York (which eliminates such figures as the adoptive Bostonian Otto Dresel) and the permanence of his residence in the United States (which eliminates that transient New Yorker William Vincent Wallace).

Leopold Damrosch is best known to music historians as a conductor—savior of the Met with his 1884–1885 season of German opera, founder and first conductor of both the New York Symphony Orchestra and the Oratorio Society of New York, and conductor of the Männergesangverein Arion (1871–1873) in New York City. But music dictionaries usually describe him as “violinist, conductor, and composer,” and when he emigrated from Breslau to New York in 1871, he had already composed eighteen published works bearing opus numbers. He carried in his trunk scores of his incidental music to Schiller's Jungfrau von Orleans and his opera based on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. He continued to compose and publish during his New York years, producing a list of works that includes a symphony and two extensive choral-orchestral works.

Music historians have largely ignored Damrosch as a composer. George Martin's indispensable biography of the Damrosch family, The Damrosch Dynasty, considers some of his works briefly. Of more general works, I know of only two that treat his music with respect and interest: Philip L. Miller's anthology of song texts, The Ring of Words, and Susan Youens's Hugo Wolf: The Vocal Music. The generous seventeen-measure sample from Damrosch's “Geh’, Geliebter, geh’ jetzt” in Youens is the only musical example from Damrosch's music I am aware of in a post-World War I book.