Marianna Martines: A Woman Composer in the Vienna of Mozart and Haydn (review)

Marianna Martines (1744-1812) is one of the most intriguing figures of late eighteenth-century Vienna. A talented singer, keyboard player, and composer, she was the pupil of the acclaimed librettist Metastasio, with whom her family shared a flat in the Altes Miachaelerhaus, the same building where the composer and singing teacher Nicola Porpora, and for a while the young Joseph Haydn, resided. She also studied composition with the court composer Giuseppe Bonno. She entertained many of the classical period's leading musicians at her weekly academies, including Charles Burney, the tenor Michael Kelly, and Mozart. Thus she was deeply involved in the musical life of the imperial capital, and because she entered that life as a woman, her career provides unique insights into Viennese society.

Considering her role in Vienna's musical activities, the lack of a book-length study of Martines and her music has been one of the obvious gaps in classic-period scholarship. Happily that gap is now filled with the publication of Marianna Martines: A Woman Composer in the Vienna of Mozart and Haydn, an excellent little volume by Irving Godt that was edited "with contributions" by John A. Rice. Having worked for years on the monograph, Godt died in 2006 just as his typescript had been accepted for publication. Rice stepped in to make final revisions in the typescript, and it is a credit to his sensitivity in doing that job that his contributions are largely indistinguishable from Godt's.

In one way particularly is Rice to be thanked for his contributions. In his editor's note, he writes "I have greatly increased the number of musical examples beyond what [Godt] envisioned, giving Martines more frequent opportunity to speak in her own voice" (p. xi). The extensive examples, several of them pages in length, provide access to music that is otherwise largely inaccessible. This is one of the book's several considerable strengths, and one that is increasingly rare in the current scholarly book market. The volume also includes a helpful listing of the Martines family (p. 213), an extensive appendix of documents in the original language and in translation (pp. 214-55), and a list of works (pp. 256-64).

Clearly, one of Godt's aims in his book was to rescue Martines from "a critical tradition hostile to the music of Martines and to women composers in general" (p. 2) that arose in the nineteenth century. Godt particularly takes issue with the Viennese pianist and novelist Caroline Pichler, known for her unflattering descriptions of Mozart that so influenced Wolfgang Hildesheimer (Mozart [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1994]), and through him the exaggerated portrayal of Mozart in Peter Schaffer's play Amadeus and the subsequent film directed by Miloš Forman.

Pichler, who was of a younger generation than Martines, casually disparaged the older woman's music, saying she found it not "to be of much interest," gratuitously adding that "not a single woman has yet succeeded in distinguishing herself as a creative musician" (quoted on p. 3). As the book's introduction documents, Pichler's opinion was passed on through Robert Eitner and Eduard Hanslick in the nineteenth century and even into the first edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians in the late twentieth century, while the more positive appraisals of Martines by Charles Burney and others were overlooked. Especially distasteful was Pichler's coy but unfounded suggestion that Martines was Metastasio's mistress. By setting the record straight, the authors have done their subject a great service.

After an introduction that covers the scholarly record as well as both biographical and musical sources, Godt and Rice devote a chapter to the Martines family and the musical environment in which Marianna grew up. Subsequent chapters proceed through her life, combining the meager biographical record with incisive discussions...