November 9, 2026
6 pm CET
Sharon Krebs: Josephine Lang’s Reputation
The book Etched in Memory presents an in-depth look at the factors that influence the durability of artistic reputation in visual artists. The findings extrapolate well to musicians. Applying them to Josephine Lang suggests that she should have fared better than she did with respect to remaining in memory. She enjoyed both recognition and renown, and essentially fulfilled all the requirements on the authors’ list of what ensures durability of reputation. Yet Lang vanished into an obscurity from which it has been much harder to release her than has been the case for Fanny Hensel and Clara Schumann. Caring for this particular woman composer has presented some challenges.
In terms of compositional renown during her lifetime, Lang far outshone both Hensel (who had not published very much because of familial opposition) and Schumann (whose renown was primarily based on her performance career). Lang published more music than either of these two women and composed more music than Clara Schumann, and the reviews of her compositions are more numerous than theirs.
The names of these three composers appear together in a letter of Ethel Smyth’s from 1878. There one finds the first indication of an important difference between them, namely Lang’s lack of a familial connection to a famous male composer. That without such a connection Lang even warranted mention is a strong indicator of how just well she was known in the 19th century. The impact of this lack of a male connection continues to this day, however, extending from academic engagement with her work to reception of recordings of her songs. The aim of this paper is to make us question how much we are still influenced today by a gendered view of recognition and renown and how much such a gendered view influences the extent to which we are able to care for the reputation of a woman who is not connected to a famous male composer. It is unfortunate if the task of bringing the achievements of a woman to people’s attention is made more difficult by unacknowledged expectations for a male connection.
Sharon Krebs, an independent scholar, holds degrees in human physiology and Germanic Studies. She has published articles on the 19th-century composer Josephine Lang, and has co-authored (with Harald Krebs) the monograph Josephine Lang: Her Life and Songs (Oxford University Press, 2007). Sharon’s conference presentations have explored issues surrounding Lang’s renown and reputation, and the role of Lang’s children in furthering their mother’s musical legacy. A further research interest probes the nightingale metaphor in the 19th century, drawing parallels between depictions of nightingales in German literature and the performance aesthetics of 19th-century Lied singers. Sharon has also published on Adelbert Chamisso’s poetic cycles with a feminine voice (Frauen-Liebe und -Leben and Thränen) and on composers’ responses to those cycles.
Felix Dieterle: Composing/Singing Motherly Love: Doing Family in Nineteenth-Century Bourgeois Song Culture
My paper combines perspectives from musicology, historical family research, and the history of emotions. It opens with a case study drawn from my own research on the Schuncke family of musicians: On the morning of August 11, 1819, Ludwig (1810–1834) presented his mother Elisabeth (1793–1860) with a (presumably) self-composed song for her birthday. It is entitled Mutterliebe (Motherly Love). Previous scholarship on the Schuncke family has been content to identify the composition as “Ludwig’s earliest surviving work“ (Ruskin King Cooper 1997) without examining its origins, musical features, performance context, or the topos of ,Mutter liebe‘ articulated through its title and lyrics. Instead, scholars have emphasized that the piece was composed by a boy of only nine years of age. This emphasis is hardly surprising: Schuncke scholarship has drawn on and perpetuated nineteenth-century narratives of genius in an effort to write Ludwig Schuncke, as a representative of his family, into a music history conceived primarily as a history of composers and their works. The portrayal of the nine-year-old Ludwig as a so-called ,Wunderkind‘ reinforces the narrative of the ,genius pianist and composer‘. By contrast, I revisit this source through the lenses of family and cultural history, posing a series of pointed questions: Why would a nine-year-old boy write a song about motherly love? Out of affection? In response to expectations shaped by bourgeois gift-giving practices? To demon strate his musical abilities and position himself within his family of musicians? Or as an act of familial self-affirmation? These questions ultimately converge in a broader one: What is ,Mut terliebe‘ and what normative ideas about women, motherhood, family, and society underlie this topos? Starting from Schuncke’s Mutterliebe and drawing on additional examples from nine teenth-century song culture, I examine how songs, as both media and products of the negotia tion, transmission, and internalization of the ,Pflichtgefühl Mutterliebe‘ (Claudia Opitz-Bela khal 2002) contributed to processes of ,doing family‘ (Carola Groppe 2014) and to the bour geois understandings of family. My analysis considers not only the lyrics and musical features of these songs, but also the specific contexts in which they were composed, performed, and used.
Felix Dieterle studied musicology and oboe at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg, Folk wang University of the Arts in Essen, and the State University of Music and the Performing Arts Stuttgart. He completed his studies in 2022 with a master’s thesis on the comparability of eighteenth-century operas, focusing on Carl Heinrich Graun’s Cleopatra e Cesare and George Frideric Handel’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto. From February to December 2022, he worked as a research associate at the German Literature Archive Marbach on the research project »textklang«. Mixed-Methods-Analyse von Lyrik in Text und Ton, where he was responsible for the subproject DH-Forschungsdesign für multimodale Archivbestände. Since January 2023, he has been a predoctoral researcher in the research project Musikerfamilien: Konstellationen und Konzepte, led by Melanie Unseld. https://www.mdw.ac.at/imi/felix-dieterle, https://musfam.hypotheses.org/
Olga Krashenko: From Baby Voice to Musical Voice: Motherhood, Lalangue and Creation in Song-Line
Composed in 2010 shortly after the birth of my first child, Song-Line for three voices emerged directly from my experience of becoming a mother. Rather than writing a work about motherhood, I found myself listening differently. The everyday sounds of my baby – crying, babbling, breathing and preverbal vocalisations – became a new sonic world that gradually entered my compositional imagination. One of the three vocal parts is therefore based on what I call a “baby voice”. Instead of using recordings of my child, I imitated these vocal gestures with my own voice and transformed them into musical material. This process allowed me to preserve the expressive qualities of the original sounds while integrating them into a composed vocal texture. Looking back, I recognise that this approach resonates with Jacques Lacan’s notion of lalangue: a vocal space that precedes structured language and carries meaning through rhythm, sound and affect rather than semantic content. The composition also combines another personal layer. The sung text comes from my own novel Person without Name, where poetry and prose intertwine with musical thinking. In Song-Line, literary writing, maternal listening and composition became inseparable parts of a single creative process. Motherhood did not simply inspire the work; it transformed the way I perceived sound and created music. Although written sixteen years ago, Song-Line remains one of my most frequently performed compositions, most recently by Trio Generator in Germany. This presentation reflects on how an intimate experience of listening within everyday family life became the foundation of a work that continues to find new performers and audiences. More broadly, it considers how motherhood can reshape artistic practice by opening new ways of hearing, creating and giving voice to experiences that often remain outside conventional musical language.
Olga Krashenko is a composer, performer, and PhD researcher in music composition at Maynooth University (John & Pat Hume Doctoral Scholarship). She studied composition at the Saint-Petersburg Conservatory and musicology at Kaliningrad Music College, and also attended Saint-Petersburg State University (history and theory of performing arts). Her works have been performed by international soloists and ensembles, including members of Ensemble Intercontemporain, Ensemble Itinéraire, 2e2m, Trio Generator, the Orchestre de Flûtes Français and others. Her opera Macondo was released in 2021 on ACEL (France). Her research focuses on Musical Holes, synaesthesia, listening practices, and sonic absence. She is the author of Research on Musical Holes (2024), Unexisting Music (2015), and River of Thoughts (2013), and has published in RTÉ Brainstorm, Foro de Investigaciones Musicales, Lacanalia, Hebdo-blog, and other journals.