The Life in Music
The Life in Music
This chapter examines the significance of the music of Ludwig van Beethoven, and of European constructions of his life and works, to New England Transcendentalism. In so doing, it shows the development and transformation of rhetorical theories of music, with the emergence in the nineteenth century of the idea of a musical work as an organic identity. The chapter focuses on the reception of Beethoven's symphonies in New England; on the impact of transatlantic ideas of the hero and the heroic on the musical discourse of Margaret Fuller (with particular reference to her letters, journals and contributions to The Dial [1840-44]); and on Fuller's dispatches from Europe for the New-York Tribune (1846-50), especially her engagement with theories of the utopian instrumentality of music, such as those of Madame de StaËl and Giuseppe Mazzini. The chapter also analyses Nathaniel Hawthorne's sceptical relation to the musical discourse of de StaËl and the New England Transcendentalists in his novel The Marble Faun (1860).
Keywords: Ludwig van Beethoven, John Sullivan Dwight, European Revolutions of 1848, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, heroic style, Giuseppe Mazzini, Madame de StaËl, New England Transcendentalism, the symphony
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