This talk interprets the unusual reception of opera singer Luigia Todi through the lens of shifting discourses around female voices, bodies, and subjectivities in late eighteenth-century Italy. By reading Todi’s singing against contemporary representations of female genius and debates about women’s “social utility,” it argues that vocal sounds, and the knowledge they seemed to reveal about a (gendered) self, were mediated through the twin fantasies of female suffering and maternal voice. The presentation opens up one piece of the broader narrative traced through Peritz’s dissertation project, which is entitled “The Lyric Mode of Voice: Song and Subjectivity in Italy, 1769–1815.”

Jessica Gabriel Peritz is the Marian and Andrew Heiskell Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize Fellow in Modern Italian Studies at the American Academy in Rome and a PhD candidate in music history at the University of Chicago.

The event will be held in English. You can watch it at https://livestream.com/aarome.