On 30 December 1847, Robert Schumann, who kept meticulous accounts in his household books, recorded: “Exciting time—Peri in Newyork [sic]!” His oratorio, Das Paradies und die Peri, was scheduled for April of the coming year. Schumann and his contemporaries were astonished to hear of the performance in a city considered at that time to be an outpost of civilization. Even today, more than 150 years later, few are aware of New York's rich musical life in the nineteenth century. A close examination, however, of the years between 1848 and 1898 reveals thriving musical institutions, cultivated music lovers, opinionated critics, and a large number of performances of music by Robert Schumann.

By the third decade of the nineteenth century, New York City had a bustling cultural life on many levels: theaters presented Shakespeare plays as well as popular ballad operas; literary masters like Washington Irving worked on translations of opera libretti, including Carl Maria von Weber's Der Freischütz and Abu Hassan, as well as folklike tales such as “The Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow”; wealthy Americans collected European and American art, but great art was also hung in public exhibition halls and was available to paying customers. The many influential daily and weekly newspapers and magazines employed knowledgeable (and often contentious) critics of literature, art, and music. By the 1840s, the New York musical scene included presentations of operas in English, Italian, French, and German; English musical theater; sacred and secular oratorios; song recitals; chamber music; symphony orchestra concerts; and open-air band concerts, as well as beer gardens with popular entertainment.

Even Dwight's Journal of Music, an influential periodical based in Boston, which considered itself the intellectual capital of the United States, conceded that New York was “the great metropolis of our Western world, like our own smaller, but not less music-loving city.” Dwight's New York correspondents sent regular news from the rival city. An 1854 column reported: “[L]ast night, in spite of the attractions of Wood's Minstrels, Christy's Minstrels, Buckley's Minstrels, and Uncle Tom's Cabin … a fine, large audience assembled at the Tabernacle to hear … the Philharmonic Society.”