Margaret Fuller and Her Circles

7 | Margaret Fuller on Music’s “Everlasting Yes”: A Romantic Critic in the Romantic Era

148 7 Margaret Fuller on Music’s “Everlasting Yes” A Romantic Critic in the Romantic Era Megan Marshall An everlasting yes breathes from the life, from the work of the artist. —Margaret Fuller, Lives of the Great Composers, 1841 We can safely add to the list of losses when Margaret Fuller went down with the Elizabeth her further contribution to the understanding and appreciation of classical music as its presence in American cultural life widened and deepened through the second half of the nineteenth century. Although as editor of the Dial she enlisted John Sullivan Dwight as the music reviewer for the first issue of the magazine, launching him on the career that would eclipse, if not erase, her own substantial early work in the field, Fuller performed that job ably for the New-­ York Tribune after she left Boston for New York City in 1844.1 She continued to seek out opportunities to hear music in performance and to refine her critical perceptions of the art when she traveled to Europe two years later; this included her attendance at a piano recital by Frederic Chopin on February 14, 1847.2 Before leaving the United States, Fuller had complained in the Tribune that it was impossible to know Chopin’s works, “because we very seldom hear them adequately performed.”3 Now she could listen to them played by the composer and write with authority, “One must hear himself; only a person as exquisitely organized as he can adequately express these subtile secrets of the creative spirit.”4 Fuller’s achievement as a music critic is an aspect of her career that, with the exception of two important articles by Ora Frishberg Saloman, has re- 149 MARGARET FULLER ON MUSIC’S “EVERLASTING YES” ceived scant attention.5 More typical is Michael Broyles’s omission of Fuller’s contributions to music criticism in his “Music of the Highest Class”: Elitism and Populism in Antebellum Boston. Broyles recognizes that coverage of classical music in Transcendentalist literary journals “contributed to the growing prestige of music during the period” and explicitly mentions the Dial as one such publication, which printed “lengthy and carefully thought out statements on various aspects of American musical culture.” Yet Broyles writes as if Dwight were the sole music critic producing essays for these publications, even though the lengthy Dial articles were mainly Fuller’s. Dwight’s more extended criticism appeared in the Harbinger, where, beginning in 1846, he honed his skills before founding Dwight’s Journal of Music in 1852.6 Fuller’s decision to write critically about music is one of the more dramatic examples of her resistance to, and lack of suitability for, normative gender roles. Like many daughters in prosperous families of her time and place, Margaret Fuller studied the piano from an early age. In her second extant letter, written to her father at age seven, she reported that she had “learned all the rules of Musick but one.” Two months later, shortly before her eighth birthday, she wrote to Timothy that she had learned to sing two-­ part harmony with her aunt Abigail, “I geuss you will buy my pianno forte.” He did, and before long, music joined the academic subjects that the young girl studied under her father’s close scrutiny. While away from home in Washington, D.C., during one of his congressional terms, Timothy confided in a letter to his wife that he had dreamed of Margaret practicing the piano: that lesson “she could never play in true time.”7 Fuller took drawing lessons at this time as well, but music was the art she studied and practiced consistently throughout her youth.8 Perhaps she was inspired by her childhood mentor and early feminine ideal Ellen Kilshaw, who captivated drawing room audiences with her playing on the harp. The “tones” that Kilshaw drew from her instrument, Fuller later wrote, remained in her memory as “heralds of the promised land I saw before me then”: the land of “accomplished” young women such as Kilshaw, who also painted in oils and spoke and moved as gracefully as her fingers plucked the harp strings.9 Fuller’s efforts at the piano did not elicit quite the same response as had Ellen Kilshaw’s at the harp. By age ten, she could proudly report that “Aunt Fuller has taught me to play ‘Bounding billows’ and sing it.” But that same year her uncle Arthur complained that “he had as lieve see Mr Whittiers children take a...