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).

Franziska Weigert: ‘Mother, Father, Child’ – Family Portrayals in German Romantic Lullabies and Their Role in Gender Discourse

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