Date/Time
Tue, Oct 1, 2024
4:30 pm EDT - 6:00 pm EDT
Maria Theresia Paradis (1759-1824) was a celebrated Viennese prodigy and piano virtuosa whose story of blindness, quack treatments under Franz Mesmer, and fame as a touring musician has been retold in novels, films, and plays. But she was also a well-known composer and beloved piano teacher, and an influential figure in the development of educational systems and adaptive technologies for the blind in Europe. At once multiply marginalized and uniquely privileged among her peers, she offers important perspectives on vulnerable virtuosity, histories of disability and music education, cure fantasy, the politics of the gaze, and late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century musical culture.
This panel – given by the organizers of an upcoming interdisciplinary, international symposium in honor of Paradis’ bicentenary that will take place at Mount Holyoke College (South Hadley, MA) and online on November 22-23, 2024 – will feature three papers on Paradis previewing recent developments (including a rediscovered musical work) and current research. In the discussion following, ample time will be devoted to questions and methodologies informing the symposium (forthcoming). Annette Richards will introduce Paradis as a historical figure, and with a focus on Paradis’s setting of Gottfried Bürger’s horror ballad, Lenore, she asks what we can learn from the ways physical and metaphorical darkness and their attendant cultures of sympathy were explored and exploited by Paradis as part of her strategies of self-representation. Chris Parton will offer a close reading of a biographical poem written for and about Paradis by the blind poet G.K. Pfeffel, exploring how representations of blindness reconfigure typical eighteenth-century relationships of the sonic to the visual in several musical settings of the poem. Adeline Mueller will discuss the symposium’s planned reconstruction of one of Paradis’ school concerts from the 1810s, new discoveries about one of Paradis’ cantatas, and a preview of a project with Mount Holyoke College’s Makerspace to create a full-size replica of a composing board invented for Paradis by her close friend and collaborator Johann Riedingerdiscuss Paradis’ music school for blind and sighted girls and young women, whose popular public concerts (alongside those of the Vienna Institute for the Blind) countered misconceptions of the blind as isolated, helpless, and pitiable.
Registration
Please click here to register for the event (free but required).
Bios
Adeline Mueller is Associate Professor of Music at Mount Holyoke College. She specializes in opera and art song by Mozart and his contemporaries, particularly in German-speaking Europe, with additional research interests in music and childhood, marginalized composers, and silent film music. Her book Mozart and the Mediation of Childhood was published in 2021 by the University of Chicago Press. She has published articles in Eighteenth-Century Music (2013) and Opera Quarterly (2012 and 2013), and contributed chapters to The Cambridge Companion to The Magic Flute (2023), Mozart in Context (Cambridge, 2018), and Wagner and Cinema (Indiana, 2010).
Christopher Parton is a Lecturer in the Writing Program at Princeton University, where he also earned his PhD in musicology in January 2024. His research focuses on the aesthetic and media histories of nineteenth-century Lieder, spanning topics including early-Romantic philosophies of love and gender, the global dissemination of German-to-English translation, and representations of disability. Last year his article “Speech and Silence: Encountering Flowers in the Lieder of Clara Schumann” came out in Nineteenth-Century Music Review.
Annette Richards is Given Foundation Professor in the Humanities and University Organist at Cornell. Her recent book, The Temple of Fame and Friendship: Portraits, Music and History in the C. P. E. Bach Circle (Chicago, 2022), grew out of her work reconstructing the extraordinary portrait collection of C. P. E. Bach. She is currently working on a book on music and the history of touch, but she is also exploring the Hammond organ and the mid-20th-century American family, and preparing two recordings of the complete organ works of C. P. E. Bach and G. A. Homilius.