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drplaceboIt's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!
Marianna Martines (1744-1812) has one unusual coincidence in her biography. As a child, she was Franz Joseph Haydn's downstairs neighbor; but even though she became a composer of some note herself, she seems to have benefited very little from her contact with Haydn.
Contrary to what her name might suggest, Martines lived her entire life in Vienna. Her grandfather was a Spanish soldier who settled in Naples; her father was born in Italy and worked at the office of the papal nuncio in Vienna from the 1720s onward. When she was born, the Martines family lived in a third-floor apartment on the Michaelerplatz in Vienna. Above them was the young Haydn, still a struggling freelance keyboard player many years removed from accepting the position at the Esterházy court that defined his career. The Martines family shared their apartment with a family friend, the poet and opera librettist Pietro Trapassi, who wrote under the name Metastasio. Metastasio had been named the Poet Laureate of the Austrian Empire in the 1730s, and his connections gave the young Marianna Martines opportunities to develop her musical talents. She was initially inclined to singing, and received lessons from Nicola Porpora, who had taught many of the leading opera singers of the day. Porpora, coincidentally, frequently hired Haydn as an accompanist for his pupils, so it is likely that Martines was accompanied by Haydn at times. Martines also briefly took keyboard lessons from Haydn but never studied music theory or composition with him -- Haydn himself was still a student of music theory, with his own earliest pieces dating from 1753. Instead, her education in music theory and composition came from Empress Maria Theresa's court composer Giuseppe Bonno.
It is unclear when Martines began to compose in earnest, as the majority of her manuscripts were lost in a fire in 1927 along with most of her personal papers. Her earliest surviving compositions, though, are not small pieces -- she composed two settings of the Catholic mass in 1760, at the age of 16, and both were performed the same year. She produced mainly sacred music early on, only transitioning to mainly instrumental music after Emperor Joseph II mandated simpler styles of church music in 1765. By 1773 her reputation was such that she was the first woman inducted into the Philharmonic Academy of Bologna, a prominent society of composers. The most striking thing about Martines's career, though, is that she was an independent composer for her entire life in an era in which most composers held full-time employment with either the church or some aristocratic household. It would have been socially unacceptable at the time for a person of high social rank (her father had been ennobled for service to the Austrian Empire), especially a woman of such standing, to seek a permanent position as a church or court composer, of course. Martines was also known for holding musical salons at her home, at which both Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri frequently appeared. She performed with Mozart herself a number of times, both as a singer and as a pianist, and she may have commissioned Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 5
As a composer, Martines was an interesting hybrid of eras, described by one musicologist as "reminiscent of Haydn in athletic mode." She had a penchant for using daring harmonic progressions that foreshadowed late Mozart and Beethoven, but within an otherwise Galant idiom. Her orchestration was especially conservative, retaining the harpsichord as basso continuo well into the 1780s. In part because of that throwback orchestration, performance opportunities dried up in the 1780s and 1790s, and she fell into obscurity during her lifetime; information on her activities after the mid-1780s is very limited.
Martines's C major Sinfonia is the only surviving symphony composed by a woman before 1800. Composed in 1770, it has many of the stylistic hallmarks of the early Classical symphonies that Haydn and Mozart were composing around the same time -- but this is certainly a more "athletic" style of music, breaking the early Classical sense of decorum with some unexpected but confident chromaticism.
Marianna Martines (1744-1812) has one unusual coincidence in her biography. As a child, she was Franz Joseph Haydn's downstairs neighbor; but even though she became a composer of some note herself, she seems to have benefited very little from her contact with Haydn.
Contrary to what her name might suggest, Martines lived her entire life in Vienna. Her grandfather was a Spanish soldier who settled in Naples; her father was born in Italy and worked at the office of the papal nuncio in Vienna from the 1720s onward. When she was born, the Martines family lived in a third-floor apartment on the Michaelerplatz in Vienna. Above them was the young Haydn, still a struggling freelance keyboard player many years removed from accepting the position at the Esterházy court that defined his career. The Martines family shared their apartment with a family friend, the poet and opera librettist Pietro Trapassi, who wrote under the name Metastasio. Metastasio had been named the Poet Laureate of the Austrian Empire in the 1730s, and his connections gave the young Marianna Martines opportunities to develop her musical talents. She was initially inclined to singing, and received lessons from Nicola Porpora, who had taught many of the leading opera singers of the day. Porpora, coincidentally, frequently hired Haydn as an accompanist for his pupils, so it is likely that Martines was accompanied by Haydn at times. Martines also briefly took keyboard lessons from Haydn but never studied music theory or composition with him -- Haydn himself was still a student of music theory, with his own earliest pieces dating from 1753. Instead, her education in music theory and composition came from Empress Maria Theresa's court composer Giuseppe Bonno.
It is unclear when Martines began to compose in earnest, as the majority of her manuscripts were lost in a fire in 1927 along with most of her personal papers. Her earliest surviving compositions, though, are not small pieces -- she composed two settings of the Catholic mass in 1760, at the age of 16, and both were performed the same year. She produced mainly sacred music early on, only transitioning to mainly instrumental music after Emperor Joseph II mandated simpler styles of church music in 1765. By 1773 her reputation was such that she was the first woman inducted into the Philharmonic Academy of Bologna, a prominent society of composers. The most striking thing about Martines's career, though, is that she was an independent composer for her entire life in an era in which most composers held full-time employment with either the church or some aristocratic household. It would have been socially unacceptable at the time for a person of high social rank (her father had been ennobled for service to the Austrian Empire), especially a woman of such standing, to seek a permanent position as a church or court composer, of course. Martines was also known for holding musical salons at her home, at which both Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri frequently appeared. She performed with Mozart herself a number of times, both as a singer and as a pianist, and she may have commissioned Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 5
As a composer, Martines was an interesting hybrid of eras, described by one musicologist as "reminiscent of Haydn in athletic mode." She had a penchant for using daring harmonic progressions that foreshadowed late Mozart and Beethoven, but within an otherwise Galant idiom. Her orchestration was especially conservative, retaining the harpsichord as basso continuo well into the 1780s. In part because of that throwback orchestration, performance opportunities dried up in the 1780s and 1790s, and she fell into obscurity during her lifetime; information on her activities after the mid-1780s is very limited.
Martines's C major Sinfonia is the only surviving symphony composed by a woman before 1800. Composed in 1770, it has many of the stylistic hallmarks of the early Classical symphonies that Haydn and Mozart were composing around the same time -- but this is certainly a more "athletic" style of music, breaking the early Classical sense of decorum with some unexpected but confident chromaticism.