THE ELECTRESS OF SAXONY, Maria Antonia Walpurgis Symphorosa (1724–80) was a composer, poet, singer, and artist of great merit, although she has only recently been rediscovered by scholars. Christine Fischer's Instrumentierte Visionen weiblicher Macht (Orchestrated Visions of Female Power, 2007) stands to date as the most thorough scholarly analysis of Maria Antonia's life and works. Fischer combines a biography of Maria Antonia and her social context with an engaging musicological investigation of the regent's three major operas. Indeed, she emphasizes the electress's activities in almost every artistic field imaginable: as a writer of lyric and prose in both French and Italian, as a practicing musician (piano and singing), as an opera composer, and even in the visual arts, as a painter. As Fischer notes, Maria Antonia was particularly influential because of the publication and wide dissemination of her works:

Among her many works, the opera Talestris stands out as being particularly significant with respect to Maria Antonia von Sachsen's political ambitions as an aspiring female ruler, who sought to reshape Saxony through enlightened ideals, such as a ruler's service to the polis, and establish a vision of female leadership that transcended binary conceptions of gender and political power predicated on violence. Both Fischer and Anne Fleig rightly understand her third and final opera, Talestris, as her definitive self-stylization as an enlightened and capable ruler of Saxony's court. This is significant because it demonstrates Maria Antonia's identification with her Amazonian protagonist.