Charlotta Seuerling

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Antoinetta Charlotta (or Charlotte) Seuerling (1782 or 1784-1828), was a blind Swedish concert singer, harpsichordist, composer and poet, known as "The Blind Song-Maiden". She was active in Sweden, Finland and Russia.

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[edit] Childhood

Charlotta Seuerling was daughter of Carl Gottfried Seuerling and Margareta Seuerling, actors and directors of a travelling theatre company, and she became blind at the age of four due to an incompetent smallpox vaccination. Four years later, at the age of eight, she really got the smallpox, and the scars made people consider her ugly, which made her shy, though she was not ugly otherwise.

As a child, she contributed to the household by singing songs she had composed herself to the music of the harp in her parents troop, widely advertised as a wonder; the singing and music-making blind child. Her father was very ambitious and upheld a high standard in the plays, often performing famous plays from the continent, such as plays by Shakespeare, and her mother was a good actress who became the first Swedish-speaking Julia in "Romeo and Juliet" in Norrköping in 1776. They toured in both Sweden and Finland, and even performed at the Swedish court on at least one occasion, and were popular among the public, but often had financial difficulties and problems with irregular staff - during periods of staff-shortage they were forced to use dolls on stage. Her sister Carolina Fredrika Seuerling was also an actress but married a vicar in 1789.

[edit] Adulthood

After her father's death in 1795, her mother moved to Finland, where the competition was small as there were no theatres there, to tour as the director of her troupe. She sent her daughter to Stockholm to have an operation that was promised to give her eyesight back. But the operation failed, and Charlotta did not have the money to go back to Finland, and she had to stay in a boardinghouse for poor women.

In the boarding house, her musical talent was discovered in 1806 by Pär Anton Borg, who taught the poor women in piano-playing, and he was so impressed that he let her stay in his home and taught her Musical theory. Impressed by her ability to learn, he added more subjects, and soon, she excelled in nature sciences, languages, composed her own poems and created a machine by which she could write her poems down. She wrote the poem "A song in a moment of melancholy", which was popular in Sweden during the entire 19th century. She was, however, uninterested in learning "women's work", and Pär Anton Borg published a pamphlet where he wrote that a woman was fully capable to learn "Male subjects", and perhaps even better than men at such, and began to teach her medicine; also in this subject, she was so successful that he argued that women would be equally and even better as doctors than men. Inspired by her, he founded a school for blind and deaf people, the first in Sweden.

Her poems and songs speak of depression, suicidal thoughts and betrayal, but also of the happiness she felt when she was given tuition by Pär Anton Borg and her life changed. One of her poems, used also as a song and very popular, began; " No ray of light shine from above, the night was terrifying and darkness surrounded me..." , and ends with : "...then as the first ray of dawn a light broke through the mist and friendship came; and with its radiance calm and joy filled my heart."

On 5 July 1809, he held a public exam for his pupils in front of five hundred guests, among them the queen, Hedwig Elizabeth Charlotte of Holstein-Gottorp. Charlotta sang her own song, "I, who does not enjoy the pleasure to see the treasured Queen" ; on this, the queen complimented her, and Charlotta, entirely in the taste of the time, fainted with happiness. She had won a great success, and the queen gave her protection to the institute.

[edit] Return

In 1810, she went to join her mother in Finland, which was now a part of Russia, and performed in her mother's theatre troupe. In 1811, her mother met with financial difficulties, and they were then both put under the protection of the Russian empress dowager, Maria Feodorovna (Sophie Dorothea of Württemberg), and each received a pension. Charlotta went to Russia, where she assisted in the foundation of the Institute for the Blind in Saint Petersburg, where she received a position. She returned to Sweden in 1823 and died five years later.

[edit] See also

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