How to Do Things with Music?

Thursday, April 24, 2025 at 6:00pm CDT

McClintock Choral and Recital Room

Paul Feller-Simmons, presenter; Cynthia Hu, soprano; Erik DeMario, tenor; Lucy Kim and Shijie Li, violin; James Kang, viola; Stephen Alltop, harpsichord; Kaylee Feller-Simmons, executive director 

Can music do what words do—make claims, take stands, change worlds? In 1732, Handel’s Esther baffled London audiences: too religious for the stage, too dramatic for the church. But in Amsterdam, the oratorio—a large-scale musical work for voices and instruments, without staging—found new meaning. Sephardic poet David Franco Mendes reimagined it in Hebrew, reshaping the work into a distinctly Jewish act of cultural expression.

PhD candidate and Presidential Fellow Paul Feller-Simmons explores how Franco Mendes’s adaptation transformed Esther into a statement of identity and belonging—an assertion that Hebrew could rival the prestige of vernacular European high art and that Jewish voices could share in the soundscapes of the Enlightenment. His version, later set to music by Austrian Catholic composer Christian Joseph Lidarti, became a bold act that reveals how the Amsterdam Sephardic community used music to change their own world. This lecture-presentation features performances of two movements from Lidarti’s Esther, with Franco Mendes’s text. 

Light refreshments to follow, hosted by The Graduate School.