Conference Agenda

“The Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song: their silence.” The silent siren imagined by Franz Kafka in an eponymous parable raises a seeming paradox. The siren, mythologized for the sound of her voice, is more powerful when she chooses to remain silent. For musicologists, Kafka’s paradox confronts us with a challenge: how might we reorient our study to think about the aspects of music-making that are inaudible? As the field of musicology endeavors to include ever more musics, methodologies, and voices, the silent siren invites us to reharmonize to a more expansive aural paradigm—one in which we might tune in to music beyond its sounding.

This paper explores the possibilities posed by such a siren in two relatively recent works. Unsuk Chin’s 2014 composition for soprano and orchestra, Le Silence des Sirènes, takes its central concept (and title) from Kafka’s parable. As the siren struggles to entrance her audience through song, her voice fades away until only her gestures remain. Yet these gestures continue to entwine her with the music, even more intensely than her song. The classical Homeric siren is rendered mute, supplanted by a modernist siren empowered by silence. In the silence of the siren, Chin invites us to reconsider what it means to “make music.”

Christine Sun Kim’s 2015 performance artwork, Face Opera II, takes Chin’s turn from aurality to physicality to an extreme, demonstrating what it might mean for music to draw power from silence. Nine Deaf performers respond to an ASL gloss displayed on a screen, but without using their hands. Instead, they rely solely on facial gestures and body movements to convey “tone.” Kim’s piece divorces musicality from sonic—and lexical—index, suggesting song that might exist without vocalization. In her gestural, inaudible opera, Kim proposes that ASL creates a kind of silent music.

These compositions ask what it might mean for music’s silence to pierce as keenly as its sound. As we rewire one of the major senses—the aural—we follow Kafka towards a minor listening practice that no longer remains unheard.

From mad divas wielding daggers to sopranos coughing blood, performances of disabled women pervade opera repertoire. Among discourse at the intersection of opera, gender, and disability, scholars largely agree that representations of disabled women in opera mirror lived experiences of marginalization, vulnerability, and alienation (Lee 2015), their scholarship working to imagine new aesthetic and representational worlds on the opera stage (Armstrong 2019). While scholarship at this intersection has addressed a variety of disability topics, the common opera narrative and lived experience of in/fertility has not yet been considered. Informed by the social model of disability, in/fertility emerges as a construction of deviance; where reproduction functions as central to cultural conceptions of womanhood, in/fertility disables women from fulfilling this gendered expectation.

I address this gap by investigating the representation of in/fertility in Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Die Frau ohne Schatten (1919), revealing how narrative and dramaturgical representations of in/fertility align with social contexts of reproduction. Die Frau ohne Schatten centers on a barren Empress who must venture into the human world to purchase a shadow (Hofmannsthal’s metaphor for fertility), or her husband will turn to stone. Therefore, the Empress’ in/fertility is positioned as narrative prosthesis, or the dependency upon disability as a metaphorical crutch, and a problem the plot aims to solve (Mitchell/Snyder, 2006).

My paper first identities in/fertility symbols in Hofmannsthal’s libretto, connecting them to broader social contexts of reproduction during the opera’s conception, before surveying the onslaught of recent productions, such as that by the Metropolitan Opera (Nov-Dec. 2024), Deutsche Oper Berlin (Jan. 2025), Staatsoper Berlin (Oct.-Nov. 2024), and Neukölln Oper (June-July 2024) for their dramaturgical representations of in/fertility. Throughout my investigation, I maintain that the opera’s in/fertility narrative reflects the social and political logics of reproduction at the time of its conception, and that such logics are either replicated or challenged in productions today. In doing so, I consider the responsibility that opera companies wield when producing operas blatantly about women’s reproductive responsibility. As reproductive rights are continually threatened, we must challenge how those marginalized for their reproductive ability are portrayed on stage.

Representations of disabilities have long been present in various artistic fields, particularly in contexts where audiences harbor an interest in spectacularizing individuals with different abilities and medical conditions. As the success of seventeenth-century Venetian opera was tied to its commercial outcome, thus depending upon the approval of opera goers, composers and librettists wrote in ways to appeal to them, often reflecting contemporary socio-cultural values. The portrayals of disability in Venetian opera therefore reflect historical understandings of this concept, both in its physiological, embodied forms, as well as its social constructions (Howe/Strauss 2016).

This paper brings an interdisciplinary approach to early opera, drawing on literary studies and disability history to investigate how disability was represented in this context (Davis 2016/Schianchi 2012). I analyze contemporaneous literary and medical sources to demonstrate how these informed dramaturgical and musical interpretations of disability in Venetian operas. One of the most valuable literary genres to understand disability from a social perspective is novels from intellectual academies, such as Cento Novelle (1651). As for physiological standpoints, the descriptions of various conditions in late sixteenth and seventeenth-century medical compendia and teratological treatises offer a crucial insight, particularly those written by physicians associated to Padova and Venice, namely Mercuriale, Santorio, and Capivaccio. Several Italian librettists and composers, such as Cavalli, Pagliardi, and Sartorio, interpreted and portrayed various disabilities in their operas, showing a clear connection to these contemporaneous sources.

I present two specific examples – blindness and kyphosis (symptomatized by a rounded back, often manifested with dwarfism) – to demonstrate a methodological approach for analyzing various representations of disability. By re-evaluating the textual and musical gestures in Venetian opera through this lens, I argue that these characters functioned as a crutch or “narrative prosthesis” (Mitchell/Snyder 2014) to index a stocked characterization, comic relief, or a problem to be overcome. This analysis will help demonstrating how certain disability tropes were reinforced in public opera, contextualizing the public discourse through art. By emphasizing the undesirability and alterity of disability, these representations not only reflect the societal treatment at the time, but also provide an insight on disability tropes still persisting today.