In a broader sense, music criticism is any form of aesthetic judgment of a musical work. In a stricter sense, the term denotes a discourse of middle-class musical culture that began in the early 18th century.

The process by which music developed into an autonomous art, together with the formation of a musical culture shaped by the middle classes, generated public reflection on musical practice in new specialist journals. The first two musical periodicals were founded at Hamburg in the early 18th century: Johann Mattheson’s Critica musica (1722/23 and 1725) and Johann Ado…