ABSTRACT
Chapter 4, “A composer in the making: Munich,” is an analysis of material from the extant documents of Mabel Daniels’s study year in Munich and her European travel: her published book, An American Girl in Munich: Impressions of a Music Student (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1905) and a notebook that spans a range of years. Daniels considered becoming a writer of fiction, but found that the plots of most women’s fiction of her day promoted highly prescriptive gender roles for women. This chapter suggests how Daniels’s writing could be subversive. Her published book presents two parallel plots, for one character, a traditional marriage plot, and for another, Daniels’s own narration of her achievement at the Conservatory. Daniels used writing to imagine different possibilities for her life, including realizing her goal to become a professional composer. The events that Daniels recorded in her book, and the literary strategies that she used in it, underscore her nascent professionalism as the first woman to pursue advanced musical studies at the Royal Conservatory of Munich and her aspirations to become a composer, a role then largely restricted to men. The chapter reveals Daniels as an American woman of her time undergoing a transitional journey of seriously pursuing a professional career in music.
