The video recording of the Twenty-Sixth Lewis Walpole Library Lecture: Music on the Dark Side of 1800: Listening to the Blind Virtuosa, Mademoiselle Paradis, is now available to view on the Yale Library Youtube channel.
Delievered by Annette Richards, Given Foundation Professor in the Humanities and University Organist, Cornell University at the Yale University Art Gallery on March 28, 2024, the lecture brings to sounding life the Paridisian contradiction between performing disability for money and resisting pity. It asks what 18th-century music culture can tell us about contemporary views on blindness and explores the ways the public performances of a young female virtuoso simultaneously embraced and critiqued a culture of gawking spectatorship, freak show aesthetics, and the ethics and economics of pity. How did this Gothic musical heroine capture the public imagination, and what does she reveal about how music looked and sounded on the dark side of 1800?