[3][4][5] He exhibited an interest in music at an early age and was instructed by his father in harmony, and also studied under Wilhelm Albert Rischbieter and Felix Draeseke at the Dresden Conservatory.

[6] During the great music festival given by his father in May 1881, he first acted as conductor in drilling several sections of the large chorus, one in New York City, and another in Newark, New Jersey.

During this time a series of concerts was given in which such works as Anton Rubinstein's Tower of Babel, Hector Berlioz's La damnation de Faust, and Giuseppe Verdi's Requiem were performed.

He engaged five musicians: oboist Marcel Tabuteau, flutist Georges Barrère, bassoonist Auguste Mesnard, and clarinetist Leon Leroy from France, and trumpeter Adolphe Dubois from Belgium.

[8] One of his principal achievements was the successful performance of Parsifal, perhaps the most difficult of Wagner's operas, for the first time in the United States, in March 1886, by the Oratorio and Symphony societies.

[17] During his visit to Europe in the summer of 1886, he was invited by the Deutsche Tonkünstler-Verein, of which Franz Liszt was president, to conduct some of his father Leopold's compositions at Sondershausen, Thuringia.

He also wrote music for performances of Euripides's Medea and Iphigenia in Tauris, and Sophocles's Electra,[8] and songs such as the intensely dramatic Danny Deever.

An example: for the first movement of Franz Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, the lyric went Although Damrosch took an interest in music technologies, he recorded sporadically.

He also recorded the complete ballet music from the opera Henry VIII by Camille Saint-Saëns, three "Airs de Ballet" from Iphigénie en Aulide by Christoph Willibald Gluck in an arrangement by François-Auguste Gevaert, and shorter works by Johann Sebastian Bach, Gabriel Fauré, and Moritz Moszkowski with the National Broadcasting Company's predecessor of the NBC Symphony Orchestra under the name of the "National Symphony Orchestra" (not to be confused with the later National Symphony Orchestra of Washington, D.C.) for RCA Victor in May and September 1930.