The obituaries came thick and fast. The Yorkshire Evening Post revealed that ‘one of Yorkshire's most distinguished authorities on music’ was also ‘vice-president of the Leeds New Canal Society’, but most focused on music and theatre. Harold Rutland in the Musical Times called him ‘a man of the theatre … His influence on the presentation of opera, as on musical scholarship generally, was incalculable, and was by no means confined to this country’. Desmond Shawe-Taylor went deeper: ‘The truth was perhaps that Dent, growing up in a period rich in great singers but often unpardonably careless in ensemble and production, took the singing for granted and concentrated his fire on the defects of the old tradition.’ There were a few understatements: ‘He rather liked upsetting people's complacency.’ His old friends had warmer memories: Steuart Wilson remembered how Dent would politely preface any reproof with ‘my dear so and so’, and how he had inherited his father's precision of speech, saying, ‘I’m not my father's son if I can't draft a resolution’. Wilson remarked on Dent's unpopularity with his colleagues, how Rootham had openly disliked him, ‘but Dent never spoke evil of any of them’. Dent was, he ended, ‘the most painstaking of friends’. Rolf Gardiner wrote: ‘Edward Dent simply showered helpfulness, complete with shrewd and sometimes merrily malicious comments on personalities.’ Trend wrote a restrained and personal piece for The Score.

The Times obituary mentions the Beethoven centenary, when Dent's remarks had shocked people: ‘In truth he was alive to Beethoven's greatness, far more keenly so than most of the eulogists, but he was not interested in what was common knowledge. He wanted to get at something which the rest of the world had not seen.’ But possibly the most characteristic view of Dent was in Music and Musicians. The BBC had produced an opera for which Dent had done the translation, but a ‘musician from abroad’ in charge of production took exception to Dent's translation: