„Schlafe, mein Prinzchen“ des Berliner Arztes Carl Eduard Flies (1770–1829) im Kontext von „Stilldebatte“, Autorschaft und Haskala

Abstract

Even today, songs from the 18th century can be found in nursery rhyme books or music boxes to sing babies to sleep. The lullaby “Schlafe, mein Prinzchen” is one of them. In music historiography, it has been a matter of debate whether it was set to music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart or by Isaac Beer (Carl Eduard) Flies. As an amateur composer the latter was active in the social environment of the Berlin salons of the 1790s, and as a doctor he practised and published until the first quarter of the 19th century. In the context of this paper, I propose to compare a close reading of the lullaby and Flies’ journal article “Ueber den modischen Misbrauch, den vornehme Mütter mit dem Selbststillen treiben”, which was published in 1800 in the Journal des Luxus und der Moden with the broad 18th-century debate about the breastfeeding of infants by the mother (as opposed to being fed by a wet nurse). The new approach, which incorporates the medical-historical perspective and that of gender studies, offers an insight that not only determines a “mother-image” in Flies’ publication in its contemporary context, but vice versa also reveals the discursive strategies in the historical dispute about the authorship of the lullaby.