Music in Boston and beyond
Born in Boston in 1844, Petersilea received his first musical instruction from his father. He continued his training at the Leipzig Conservatory, where his teachers included Ignaz Moscheles, and developed a career as a performer and instructor. In 1871 he established the Petersilea Academy of Music in Boston, which also offered elocution and languages. He spent the spring of 1884 with Franz Liszt in Weimar.
His teaching career included two periods at the New England Conservatory, in 1868–1869 and 1887–1891. Surviving letters, tuition receipts and recital programmes in its archive document his work with pupils. In 1892 he moved to California, making his home with his wife at Tropico, near Los Angeles. He wrote music studies as well as fiction and Spiritualist books, and died in 1903.
Letters attributed to the dead
The held Letters from the Spirit World was published in Chicago by the Progressive Thinker Publishing House in 1905, after Petersilea’s death. Its title page describes him as the medium through whom the letters were written, naming his father, Franz Petersilea, and other deceased celebrities as their purported authors.
The opening letter addresses Carlyle as a son and continues the account of an afterlife previously presented in The Discovered Country. It describes a celestial world, individual spiritual development and the arrival there of the freethinker Robert G. Ingersoll. Biblical images receive symbolic interpretations within a hopeful account of continued life. These voices and scenes express the book’s Spiritualist claims; the attribution to deceased people is not independently verified correspondence.
