“Historical Anthology of Music by Women”
Vienna-born Marianne von Martinez was only nine years old when the poet and librettist Pietro Metastasio discovered her great musical talents and undertook to supervise her training. To this end he called on Niccolò Porpora and the then-unknown Franz Joseph Haydn to give the young girl lessons in singing, playing keyboard instruments, and composition, while Metastasio himself provided her general education. In addition, Martinez studied counterpoint with Giuseppe Bonno and probably received informal suggestions and guidance from Johann Adolph Hasse.
Marianne was quick to attract the attention of the Viennese court because of her abilities as a performer, and she was only in her teens when an early Mass of her own composition was performed at St. Michael’s, the court chapel. Other works soon followed—oratorios, cantatas, sacred choral compositions, arias, piano concertos, piano sonatas, and a symphony among them. Though her music was performed and much admired, most of Martinez’s compositions remained unpublished; they exist only in the manuscript copies owned by the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna.
Charles Burney’s account of the time he spent with Marianne von Martinez during his visit to Vienna in 1772 remains the most extended and enthusiastic appreciation of her skills as a singer, keyboard artist, and composer. It is also a testimony to her intelligence and refinement. Mozart sought Martinez out to perform with him in his piano duets, and singer Michael Kelly paid tribute to her in his memoirs. In 1773 she was made an honorary member of Bologna’s Accademia Filarmonica, which cited the nobility of expression and the amazing precision exhibited in her works. About the same time, she may also have received an honorary doctorate from the University of Pavia.
Though Marianne von Martinez was never a professional musician in the technical sense of the term, she devoted her life to music and the arts. After the death of Metastasio, who left her and her siblings large sums of money, Martinez’s home became a center of artistic life during a truly Golden Age of Viennese music. During the 1790s, when Martinez had apparently ceased to be an active composer, she turned to teaching, and the singing school she opened in her home turned out many fine pupils.
The Sonata in A is one of two piano sonatas by Marianne von Martinez published in 1765 by Johann Ulrich Haffner of Nürnberg. She was only 21 at the time the sonata was printed, but she had learned her lessons well. The three-movement work is written with a sure hand in a style that reveals Martinez’s own facility at the keyboard and the influence of her teacher Haydn. The first movement, a sprightly Allegro, is reproduced here.
At the opening, thematic ideas are stated, expanded upon, then recalled in a different order and a more concise manner than in their original presentation. The dotted rhythm that marks the initial A-major theme soon gives way to triplet figuration as the music moves to the dominant. Here, several identifiable ideas emerge (see mm.4, 6, 8, 9, and 12). Though each of these themes has a different shape, they are similar in character and are unified by the recurrence of scalar fragments in 64th notes that lend a feeling of energy and forward motion to this section of the work.
The second half of the movement presents the themes of the first in new combinations, in a working-out that is largely sequential. At m.25, material from mm. 6- 8 returns, this time in the tonic. A restatement of the movement’s opening theme (m.29) is followed by ideas from mm.9-13, but in A rather than E. The transparent texture and the highly ornamented melody of the first movement create a sunny atmosphere that is clouded over only slightly in the second, a rather melancholy Adagio in A minor. This middle movement features a melody that is clearly in the popular empfindsamer Stil of the time. An appealing minuet in A major concludes the sonata.
Recording
The Romance of Women’s Music. Sonata in A major, Nancy Fierro. Pelican LP 2017 (1979).
Further Reading
Biographical articles in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart.
Burney, Charles. The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands and United Provinces. 2 vols. 2d ed., corrected. London: T. Becket, J. Robson, and G. Robinson, 1775.
Geiringer, Karl. Haydn, a Creative Life in Music. Rev. ed. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968.
Newman, William S. The Sonata in the Classic Era. 3d ed. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983.
Scholes, Percy, ed. An Eighteenth Century Musical Tour in Central Europe and the Netherlands. Dr. Burney’s Musical Tours in Europe, vol. 2. London: Oxford University Press, 1959.
Reprinted from Alte Meister, Sammlung wertvoller Klavierstücke des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts. No. 60. Edited by E. Pauer. Leipzig: Breitkopf &. Hartel [1868-85]. By permission of G. Schirmer-Associated Music Publishers.
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