January 12, 2026
6 pm CET
Christopher Parton: Maria Theresia Paradis and Eighteenth-Century Fictions of Blindness
The life of the blind Viennese musician Maria Theresia Paradis (1859-1824) has become more widely known to the public thanks to a wave of recent retellings in novels, film, and a chamber opera. Her story of childhood blindness, prodigious musical talent, and failed treatment in the care of Franz Mesmer seems to be as compelling today as it was in the 18th century. Indeed, when Paradis set out on a two-year fund-raising tour in 1784, she used this notoriety to her advantage to attract curious audiences. In European salons, she regularly performed a solo cantata, written by the blind writer Conrad Pfeffel and set to music by her teacher Leopold Koželuch, which mythologized her life story of childhood tragedy and subsequent musical gifts to play on the sympathies of her audiences. In singing her biography while accompanying herself at the piano, she embraced what Joseph N. Straus terms the ‘dual task’ of disabled performers: ‘to perform music and to perform disability.’
In this lecture I offer a close reading of Koželuch’s setting of Pfeffel’s poem, examining how it relates fictions of Paradis’s life both to her real-life experiences and to eighteenth-century attitudes towards blind women. I will focus on Pfeffel’s evocation of St. Cecilia, the patron saint of music and blindness, who bestows on the young Paradis the gift of music in the poem. This moment brings together contemporary associations of ideal femininity as the embodiment of artistic inspiration with blindness as divine gift. In Koželuch’s solo cantata, Cecilia’s reported speech becomes its own aria, making her words the phenomenal song of Paradis herself. As I will show, this conflation of Paradis/Cecilia extended into other media, notably her personal Stammbuch. Towards the end of the lecture, I will discuss Paradis’s own setting of Pfeffel’s poem, which refuses the excesses of Koželuch’s cantata in a way that plays down the association with Cecilia. Paradis, I contend, was well aware she was also performing her gender when singing her fictionalized biography.
Christopher Parton is a Lecturer in the Writing Program at Princeton University. He received his PhD in musicology from Princeton in 2024, having previous studied music at the University of Bristol and University of Oxford. His research examines the poetics of love and desire in nineteenth-century Lieder, with a focus on women composers. His article, ‘Speech and Silence: Encountering Flowers in the Lieder of Clara Schumann’ was recently published in Nineteenth-Century Music Review. From 2020-2021, Chris was Gastwissenschaftler at the Beethoven-Haus Archiv in Bonn, supported by a DAAD Grant.
Franziska Weigert: ‘Mother, Father, Child’ – Family Portrayals in German Romantic Lullabies and Their Role in Gender Discourse
Lullabies convey heavy undertones of gender, as both the genre and the singing practice are rooted in the nuclear family – a space where gender roles become strikingly evident. In 19th-century German lullabies, (mostly male) poets and composers portray the bourgeois family consisting of mother, father, and child, in line with heteronormative ideals. Mothers in particular are depicted in a stereotypical manner, embodying the “good mother” (gute Mutter) trope: they are ever-loving, caring, and present. Father figures, on the other hand, are much more diverse – and much more absent. The child is wanted, loved and cared for. Nevertheless, sons and daughters are depicted and addressed differently. These gender depictions go hand in hand with the ‘emotionalization of the family’ (Baader 1996). This means that emotions such as love and sorrow communicate the parental-infant-bond throughout the extensive lullaby repertoire of that century.
Drawing on the performative concepts of ‘doing gender’ and ‘doing emotions’ (Scheer 2012), I will discuss the construction of female and male genders in lullabies, contextualising these findings alongside other sources of family history, such as pedagogical writings, literature, and encyclopaedias. This aims to demonstrate the role that gender bias plays in the lullaby-production, how gender discourse is pursued and manifested in lullabies, and how those gender norms might still influence our perception of family today.
Franziska Weigert studied Musicology and Italian Philology at the University of Regensburg and completed her Master’s degree in Musicology at Ludwig Maximilian University Munich. Having worked for several years as a research assistant on the critical song edition of the Richard Strauss Edition (Munich), she is currently completing her doctoral research at the Department of Musicology at the University of Regensburg with a study on German lullabies in the long nineteenth century (supervised by Katelijne Schiltz and Marie Louise Herzfeld-Schild). Concurrently, she is conducting a transnational study of the contemporary use of lullabies at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (Frankfurt am Main).
Frances Falling: Poet, Composer, Mother: Exploring Identity and Agency in Florence Price’s Art Songs
Florence Price’s (1888–1953) art songs offer insight into how she shaped her identity as an African American composer, performer, and mother in a musical world dominated by white, Eurocentric traditions. While her orchestral works have attracted scholarly attention, her art songs—especially those she dedicated to family members, wrote using her own poetry, or set to texts by other women—remain less studied. This presentation considers what function the art song played in Price’s career and life. On one hand, these works often had a personal role, as in “To My Little Son” (in memory of her firstborn Tommy, who died at age five) and “Song to the Dark Virgin” (dedicated to her eldest daughter). On the other, they served as vehicles for social commentary, lifting up prominent African American poets and engaging with texts that may reflect her resistance to racial injustice. By dedicating certain pieces to celebrated singers such as Marian Anderson, Price may also have made strategic choices to gain greater visibility, attract publisher interest, and keep her music in circulation—an advantage over orchestral works, which might have been performed only once or twice and depended on a conductor’s advocacy.
As part of the doctoral project “Performing Mothers: Self-designs. Challenges. Strategies. Johanna Kinkel, Clara Schumann, Maria Herz, Florence Price”, this presentation experiments with a “Lückenschreiben” approach, viewing Price’s songs as possible primary sources in the absence of extensive ego documents. Songs such as “Spring” and “Trouble Done Come My Way”, in which Price is both poet and composer, may be especially revealing for exploring how musical and textual details suggest strategies for self-fashioning at the intersection of gender and race. The presentation will integrate unpublished manuscripts, printed editions, and recordings, and short audio excerpts with commentary, showing how Price’s art songs shaped both her success and her creative identity.
American singer and musicologist Frances Falling’s musical journey began with the children’s opera choir at the Hessen State Theater in Wiesbaden. She holds a Bachelor’s in Choral Music Education from Florida State University, where she produced a documentary on Clara Schumann. A Fulbright grant supported her Master’s research at the University of Leipzig on semi-professional children’s choirs. At the Schumann-Haus in Leipzig, Frances contributed to a Clara Schumann-focused exhibition and developed Lieder lecture recitals. After three seasons with the Gewandhaus Choir, she moved to California, freelancing as singer and musicologist. She is pursuing a PhD at the Kunstuniversität Graz on “performing mothers” of the 19th and 20th centuries, supported by the Forschungszentrum Musik und Gender, and specializes in narrated Lied recitals highlighting women composers. She is active in the Bühnenmütter* Association.
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AGiD Session 5
an online lecture