December 7, 2026
6 pm CET
Lorraine Byrne Bodley: Un(veiling) our Hidden Truths: Infanticide in 19th and 20th Century Artsong
So much has been written about Schubert’s ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’ (D 118): the metaphorical spinning wheel, the dual significance of Schubert’s piano accompaniment, the psychological realism of the first climax, even Schubert’s extraordinary understanding of love at seventeen. What is most extraordinary about this lied is never mentioned: that it is a nineteenth-century song of erotic compulsion sung by a woman and that its censored subject also gave the song its notoriety and originality.
What were the confluence of biographical, compositional and cultural-historical influences which crystalized in Schubert’s first masterpiece? Who was Schubert’s Gretchen in 1814? Who was Goethe’s Gretchen in 1774 and who is Gretchen today? As the earliest reviews show everything is different after this Lied, and people comprehend song differently. Why do you think this is?
In attempting to answer these and other questions, this presentation will unveil hidden truths in a song which is not only pivotal in music history and in Schubert’s compositional development, but one which pushed back the boundaries of what song could represent. If the sharp vicissitudes of fortune that destroyed many women was hardly the sole raison d’etre for ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’, it nevertheless runs like a red thread from Goethe’s Urfaust to Schubert’s Gretchen and in her afterlives in twentieth century song such as Bodley’s A Girl. No song worth its salt is unconcerned with the world it answers for and sometimes answers to, and that answering function is what makes a song like ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’ in the deepest way responsible – capable of offering a response, but a response in its own terms. As Chekov observed, ‘art doesn’t have to solve a problem, it only has to formulate it correctly’: in that selfsame spirit ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’ and Bodley’s A Girl provide a litmus test for the artistic advocacy of women’s vulnerability across cultures and across the 19th and 20th centuries. Neither resolve the particular social reality they present, but both speak to the listener very immediately because of each composer’s ability to frame their heroine’s experience with obvious compassion and honest clarity. Both works invite the audience to feel fully the weight of the protagonist’s plight and leave us to recognize how much of our own condition is reflected in hers.
Lorraine Byrne Bodley is Professor of Music at Maynooth University. She holds a double doctorate in Music and in German from University College Dublin (2000) and is the first woman in Ireland to be conferred with a DMUS in Musicology, a higher doctorate on published work (NUI, 2012). In 2014 she was Gerda Henkel Visiting Professor at the Schubert Archive in Tübingen and an invited Board Member of the Internationale Schubert-Gesellschaft Vienna. In 2015 she was elected Member of the Royal Irish Academy and the first woman to be elected President of the Society for Musicology in Ireland, for which she served two terms (2016–2021). In 2016 she was granted a personal chair in Musicology at Maynooth University and in 2020 she was appointed Board Member of the Schubert Research Centre at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. In the same year she was invited to be General Editor with Harry White of the International Book Series, Irish Musical Studies (Four Courts Press, 1990–2020, and Boydell and Brewer 2020–). She is deeply committed to the curation of her late husband’s music and life’s work, to which end she recently qualified as a Professional Archivist (UCD, 2026). Lorraine is known internationally for her work on Schubert, on Goethe and Music, on which she has published prolifically and given over 150 international guest lectures. One of the hallmarks of her research is that it is internationally recognized in two disciplines: Musicology and Germanistics. She has published 16 books including a number of critical editions of Schubert’s opera Claudine von Villa Bella performed by the Regina Symphony Orchestra (2004); Goethe’s and Eberwein’s melodrama, Proserpina for professional performance by the National Symphony Orchestra, Ireland (2007), the Thüringer Symphoniker (2010) and Munich Symphony Orchestra (2018). Other public outreach work include guest-curating a lecture series Schubert Symphonies performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic conducted by Gustavo Dudamel (2016). Her most recent monograph is the award-winning biography, Schubert. A Musical Wayfarer (Yale University Press, 2023) which is being translated into German (Hollitzer Verlag, 2027). She has been commissioned to write a new entry on Schubert for Grove Music Online.
Maria Behrendt: Happiness or Misery? Ambivalent Representations of Motherhood in musical settings of Chamisso’s Frauenliebe und -leben and Thränen
Adelbert von Chamisso’s poetry cycle Frauenliebe und -leben depicts an idealized, supposedly typical woman’s life in which marriage, and above all motherhood, are presented as the ultimate goal. “Only one who nurses, only she who loves the child she nurses, only a mother knows what it means to love and be happy,” the seventh poem, “An meinem Herzen, an meiner Brust,” declares. Motherhood is portrayed quite differently in the poetry cycle Thränen, written only a few months later: here, a woman is married against her will and experiences the prospect of pregnancy as a profound threat. Both cycles were set to music numerous times, although rarely in their entirety. Interestingly, most of the omissions occur precisely in those passages that address the transition from bride to mother. Drawing on a range of musical settings, this paper examines the ambivalent representation of motherhood in Frauenliebe und -leben and Thränen, focusing in particular on the cuts made by the composers. These create what may be termed “gaps”—deliberately omitted or unspoken elements that open up spaces for interpretation while simultaneously directing the gaze of the recipients. Put differently: What were nineteenth-century listeners meant to learn about motherhood—and what were they not meant to hear? And is maternal love really the biological automatism that continues to be celebrated as an ideal to this day?
Maria Behrendt is a junior professor at the Hannover University of Music, Drama and Media, and Head of the Research Center Music and Gender (fmg). She specialises in the German Art Song, Music and Gender, and Film Music. Maria studied musicology, media and French studies in Berlin and Münster, funded by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation. As a scholar of the DAAD, she studied at the University of Wales in Bangor between 2011 and 2012, where she was awarded a Master of Arts by Research for her work on the Nordic Sound of Carl Loewe’s ballads. She completed her Doctoral Dissertation on “Romantic aspects in the German Lied of the 1830s” in 2018. Between 2014 and 2024 she held positions as research fellow at the University of Music Weimar-Jena and the University of Marburg. Maria is a member of the editorial board of the “Kieler Gesellschaft für Filmmusikforschung” and co-hosts several podcasts.