Fembio Special: Women from Vienna
Maria Theresia Paradis
born on May 15, 1759 in Vienna, Austria
died on February 1, 1824 in Vienna, Austria
Austrian composer, pianist and teacher
200th anniversary of death on February 1, 2024
265th birthday on May 15, 2024
Biography
Maria Theresia Paradis received an exceptional education for a middle-class girl of the 18th century. After being given a spinet at the age of eight and quickly making the most astonishing progress on it, she was taught the fortepiano and organ by Franz Josef Fuchs and Georg Friedrich Richter. Richter, “adhering to Bach’s written instructions, trained her fingers to play so dexterously that she was able to perform all the concertos of the great masters.”
Her skills on the various keyboard instruments also impressed Empress Maria Theresa, who had heard the eleven-year-old play the organ and subsequently provided the girl with financial support. The annual stipend of 200 guilders was used to pay for her further training with prominent Viennese teachers: Leopold Kozeluch, a renowned piano teacher, music publisher and composer who also worked at the Viennese court, the singing teacher Vincenzo Righini, and Antonio Salieri as her teacher of music theory.
Such a comprehensive and fundamental musical education would have been appropriate for a future court conductor, and the sheer amount of learning and practicing that the young Maria Theresia Paradis accomplished was all the more amazing given that she had been blind since the age of four. Apart from the fact that blindness was often equated with mental illness in the 18th century and blind people were therefore believed to lack any intellectual or creative abilities - how was it possible for a blind girl to learn music?
Maria Theresia Paradis herself explained:
I have two excellent grand pianos. The pieces are played to me and I try to play them straight away. My teachers improve my fingering a little, and I often learn one and a half soli in one lesson, without much effort. [...] My ear is pretty good. I can rely on it more than on my hands. I play concertos by P. E. Bach, Reichardt, Wolf, Müthel, Richter, Benda, Schobert etc. It is solely thanks to my memory that I do not get the various pieces confused.
Maria Theresa Paradis became a cause célèbre in Vienna after the physician Franz Anton Mesmer attempted to restore her sight with his method of “animal magnetism” in 1777. The controversial treatment resulted in a scandal and Mesmer was forced to leave Vienna in 1778 after his cure failed to work. Twelve years later Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart would irreverently allude to Mesmer’s magnetic “healing method” in his opera Così fan tutte: disguised as a doctor, Despina places a magnet on Ferrando and Guglielmo to bring them back to life after they had been supposedly poisoned with arsenic.
Maria Theresia Paradis concentrated entirely on her musical career after the Mesmer scandal. Accompanied by her mother, she set off on a concert tour in 1783 which lasted almost three years. The harmonious triad of music, blindness and feminine demureness became her hallmark: “Fräulein Therese von Paradis was [...] not pretty, but full of spirit, kindness of heart and talent, especially for music, which, taken together with her misfortune, made her a very attractive personality.” She met the writer Sophie La Roche in Mannheim and Valentin Haüy in Paris, whom she encouraged to found the first institute for the blind in France. It is believed that Mozart composed his Piano Concerto No.18 in B-flat major K. 450 for her to perform in Paris.
In 1786, her compositions — songs, piano works and chamber music — were printed for the first time. She also composed two piano concertos, cantatas, Singspiels and an opera. Her companion Johann Riedinger had constructed a composition board for her which enabled her to write down her compositions in a “tactile musical script.” She returned to Vienna in 1786 and founded a music school for blind girls and boys there in 1808.
(Text from 2008, translated with DeepL.com; edited by Ramona Fararo, 2024.)
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