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.

Christopher Parton: Maria Theresia Paradis and Eighteenth-Century Fictions of Blindness

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