Conference Agenda

In early September 1962 at a museum in Wiesbaden (West Germany), a young man of small stature, dressed in the full tails of a symphony conductor, took the stage. With a baton in the grip of his prosthetic right hand, the conductor stepped on the podium, took an elaborate bow, and began to gesture expressively at the chairs around him. No sound was heard, however, for this work of instrumental theater by the West German experimental composer Dieter Schnebel, interpreted by the actor Alfred Feussner, was in fact a solo, entitled “Nostalgia: Solo for 1 Conductor (Visible Music II).”

Feussner and Schnebel’s “Nostalgia” centered the postwar body to ask: what is music, if inaudible, yet still visible? This conceptual question was fitting for the setting of this world premiere at the first “Fluxus International Festival of the Newest Music.” Recent musicological reappraisal of Fluxus has recognized the fundamentally musical nature of the movement (Cohen 2022; Voithofer 2021). I use archival evidence to demonstrate the centrality of the non-normative body to Fluxus, bringing this musicological reconsideration of Fluxus into conversation with insights from disability studies at the intersections of music and theater (Straus 2011; Kuppers 2015).

In my paper, I analyze this “newest music” in relation to “instrumental theater,” an emergent avant-garde genre that, I argue, uses the performer’s body to radically upset inherited ways of listening to—and viewing—music. Indeed, composers of this music often explicitly framed their work as a rejection of the physically transcendent tradition of “absolute music,” suggesting continuities between the body’s conceptual erasure and the repression of Germany’s history. By transgressing social norms in the thematization of physical violence and bodily functions, Fluxus performance and instrumental theater created space for differently bodied and Othered individuals working in West Germany to expose and deconstruct the prejudices of West German society. Using Feussner and Schnebel’s “Nostalgia” at the Wiesbaden festival as a case study, I demonstrate how composers and performers of instrumental theater used the genre to display, and disrupt, the continuities between the Nazi regime, eugenic ideologies, and a West German society eager to forget its recent past.

From the “Dance of the Prisoners in Chains” in _The Beggar’s Opera_ (1728) to “the celebrated Crutch Dance” of the street beggars in the first act of William Bates’s _The Ladies’ Frolick_(1770), characters with visible impairments can be found in the casts of the musical theater hits of eighteenth-century England. Though scholars have investigated the role of street performance and begging in music (Atkinson, Hailwood, Porter) and how disabilities have been voiced in early modern English music (Bassler, Eubanks-Winkler), the music for the dances representing visible disabilities on the London stage in the eighteenth century has not yet been examined.

The aim of this presentation is to examine corporeal difference as performed on stage in eighteenth-century England by focusing on “crutch dances,” thereby synthesizing burgeoning developments in disability studies with new research on eighteenth-century theatre and music.

The disabled body is held in opposition to the (usually masculine) “Sound” body, and that when it is offered for audience consumption it is utilized for comic relief; this concept is embodied in the music for the dances as well. In addition, attention will be paid to the language used to represent disabled characters, who often represent other ideas. These visual and aural representations of corporeal disability can teach us much about contemporary social attitudes about bodily difference, poverty, reform, and the “dangers” of Britain’s increasingly urban society.

In his review of composer Louise Bertin’s and librettist Victor Hugo’s 1836 French opera La Esmeralda, Hector Berlioz proclaims, “as for the air of Quasimodo, I do not hesitate to regard it as a small masterpiece.”^[1] Based on Hugo’s novel Notre-Dame de Paris, La Esmeralda directly addresses visible Disability in a variety of significant ways, as both Quasimodo—known to modern audiences as the hunchback of Notre-Dame, keeper of the Notre-Dame bell tower—and the opera’s composer Louise Bertin were visibly Disabled. In this paper, I investigate the role of narrator and narrative perspective in the formation of Disabled characters, and I contend that Bertin imbues the Quasimodo character with her lived experiences as a Disabled woman, breathing new life into the bellringer and forming him into a complex, Disabled person. Notably, musicological literature has not discussed the nineteenth-century operatic character type of the hunchback through the lens of Disability Studies; therefore, in my study of this opera, I utilize theories recently developed in Disability Studies, Cultural Studies, and Literature Studies to shed light on the construction of Disabled identity in nineteenth-century Paris. Further, I analyze letters addressed to Bertin and the cultural elites in her social circle, including Victor Hugo, Astolphe, Marquis de Custine, and Giacomo Meyerbeer, to better understand how Bertin’s closest friends and colleagues perceived her Disability.

While Victor Hugo hides Quasimodo in the darkened recesses of his 1831 novel, Louise Bertin shines light on the bellringer in her opera. She encourages Quasimodo to take ownership over his story in his acclaimed Act IV aria “Mon Dieu, j’aime,” commonly known as the Air des cloches (Song of the bells). Unlike the unwieldy, practically speechless bellringer of Hugo’s novel, Bertin’s Quasimodo is eloquent and thoughtful. Bertin not only represents Quasimodo as an intrinsically musical being with an unconventional connection to the bells of the Catédrale Notre-Dame de Paris, but she also portrays Quasimodo’s intellect and emotional state through the sound of chiming bells. Through the act of singing, Quasimodo carves out a space for his unique perspective on the city of Paris, the pealing of bells echoing his resolve. Significantly, bells appear nowhere else throughout the score, leaving the power of the belltower to Quasimodo alone. Through my research on Louise Bertin and Quasimodo, I hope to expand the current academic understanding of representations of Disabled persons in nineteenth-century opera and by Disabled operatic composers, thereby creating a history that better reflects diverse musical bodies of the past and present.

[1] Hector Berlioz, “La Esmeralda,” Revue et Gazette Musical 3, no. 47 (November 1836): 409-411. Trans. in Denise Lynn Boneau, “Louise Bertin and Opera in the 1820s and 1830s” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1989), 598, 604-606.