Marianna Martines: An "Incomparable" Musician "Endowed with Superior Genius"

Anna Catharina ("Marianna") Martines (died 13 December 1812)

Born in Vienna on 4 May 1744, the musician Anna Catharina Martines was the daughter of Nicolo Martinez and his wife, Maria Theresia.

Anna Cathariana--"Marianna"--Martines

Her surname, unusual in Austria, was from her paternal grandfather, a Spanish soldier who had settled in Naples. Martines's father, Nicolo, was born in Naples, took up his father's military career, and also became a soldier, serving in the forces of the Habsburg Archduke Charles, whose claim to the Spanish throne triggered the War of the Spanish Succession. Charles did not become the Spanish king, but he was elected as Holy Roman Emperor in 1711.

Having come to Austria with Charles's forces, Niccolo Martines met and married the Austrian Maria Theresia. In order to remain in Austria, he turned from a military to a civilian career, taking up the post of papal nuncio, a diplomatic representative of the pope, in the Habsburg court.

His success in that role reflects his liberal education and his friendship with intellectuals and artists, like the Italian poet and librettist Pietro Antonio Trapassi, with whom the family shared a house in Vienna.

About Trapassi and his significance in her family, Marianna Martines would later write: "But in all my studies, the chief planner and director was always, and still is, Signor Abbate Metastasio [Trapassi's pseudonym] who, with the paternal care he takes of me and of all my numerous family, renders an exemplary return for the incorruptible friendship and tireless support which my good father lent him up until the very last days of his life.”

As Martines notes, Trapassi oversaw her musical education. Under his direction, Anna Catharina, who would later rename herself Marianna, showed early promise as a musician, both as a singer, training with the Neapolitan composer Niccolò Porpora, and as a keyboardist, taking lessons with Franz Joseph Haydn. (Haydn seems to have lived in the same building in Vienna.)

Showing some promise as a composer, Martines began studying with the German composer Johann Adolph Hasse and with Giuseppe Bonno, an Austrian composer (of Italian origins, as his name suggests) for the imperial court.

Marianna Martines would perform for the court as a child; as an adult, she would go on to perform for the Empress Maria Theresa.

Given her sex and social class, Martines did not have a professional appointment (like court musician), nor was she paid for her performances. However, although she remained in Vienna, she garnered a reputation throughout western Europe. She established a vocal studio, where she trained her own students, and she maintained professional friendships and associations with other musicians, including Mozart, with whom she is known to have performed. 

Although she did not travel, Martines was elected to the Accademia Filarmonica (Philharmonic Academy) of Bologna in 1773 (the motet she composed for the academy was never performed, however.)

Marianna Martines,
portait by Peter Anton Lorenzoni

During her life, Martines composed a sizable number of works in multiple genres. Her legacy survives in her musical compositions, about sixty-five of which are known today.

As an interesting note, the English musicologist Charles Burney, the father of novelist Fanny Burney, saw Martines perform when he was in Vienna:

Her performance indeed surpassed all that I had been made to expect. She sung two airs of her own composition, to words of Metastasio, which she accompanied on the harpsichord, in a very judicious and masterly manner; and, in playing the ritornels, I could discover a very brilliant finger. To say that her voice was naturally well-toned and sweet, that she had an excellent shake, a perfect intonation, a facility of executing the most rapid and difficult passages, and a touching expression, would be to say no more than I have already said, and with truth, of others; but here I want words that would still encrease the significance and energy of these expressions. The Italian augmentatives would, perhaps, gratify my wish, if I were writing in that language; but as that is not the case, let me only add, that in the portamento, and divisions of tones and semi-tones into infinitely minute parts, and yet always stopping upon the exact fundamental, Signora Martinetz was more perfect than any singer I had ever heard: her cadences too, of this kind, were very learned, and truly pathetic and pleasing.

For an excellent and thorough essay on Martines, I recommend the entry at the Encyclopedia of World Biography, which you can access by clicking here.

For more information on Martines's surviving work, the Women of Note: Celebrating Two Hundred and Fifty Years of Music by Women website posts technical details (click here). Scores are available here, at the International Music Score Library.

There is also a full-length study, Irving Godt's Marianna Martines: A Woman Composer in the Vienna of Mozart and Haydn. 

Hester Lynch Piozzi, More Than "Dr. Johnson's Mrs. Thrale"

Hester Salusbury Thrale Piozzi (married Gabriel Mario Piozzi on 25 July 1784)

"Mrs. Thrale" has long been known to history primarily for her recollections of her friend, the famous poet, essayist, and lexicographer Samuel Johnson, whom she met in 1765. More recently, however, she has been recognized as a writer in her own right.

Born on 16 January 1741,* Hester Salusbury was the daughter of the Welsh landowner John Salusbury and his wife, also named Hester. 

Hester Thrale and her eldest daughter, Hester Maria,
painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds

Her marriage to the London brewer Henry Thrale in 1763 was desirable from both her father and husband's perspectives; her father was bankrupt, and Thrale was wealthy, and Thrale, while rich, was seeking to improve his social status by marriage. 

Like many eighteenth-century marriages, the linked partners were not particularly compatible. She loved "conversation and adventure," and "thrived on attention." For his part, Henry Thrale, was "remote, socially insecure and periodically unfaithful."

Thrale wanted a woman who would not only improve his social standing but produce children, and Hester certainly fulfilled her role. She was pregnant at least thirteen times in the first fifteen years of their marriage. She gave birth to twelve children--though only four daughters survived into adulthood. Still, her eldest daughter, Hester Maria, married the wealthy Admiral Lord Keith, becoming, in the process, Viscountess Keith 

Through her marriage to Thrale, Hester managed to enter fully into London society, hosting parties at the couple's house in Streatham. Her intimate acquaintances included writers like Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, and Fanny Burney, politiians like Edmund Burke, actors and theatrical people like David Garrick, and painters, like Sir Joshua Reyolds.

Johnson and Hester Thrale became particularly intimate friends--Johnson came to be like a member of her family and spent much of his year living with the Thrales.

After Henry Thrale's death in 1781, many expected the wealthy widow to marry Dr. Johnson--instead, she married Gabriel Mario Piozzi, her eldest daughter's music teacher. Shock and horror ensued--Johnson himself said she had "ignominiously married" and condemned her "wickedness." 

Fanny Burney, whom Hester Thrale Piozzi had encouraged and supported, was also offended by the match (though, ironically, she too would enter into a shocking marriage, to an impoverished French artillery officer and immigrant who was, horrors, a Catholic!) 

Nevertheless, Hester Piozzi seems to have been happy in this second marriage, and she enjoyed a long and productive life. 

In 1786, she published Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D., during the last Twenty Years of his Life and two years later, a two-volume edition of Letters to and from the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. While less well known than Boswell's Life of Johnson, even the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica, frequently unkind to women and their achievements, is notably kind to Piozzi's work: "Although less accurate in some details than Boswell’s, her accounts show other aspects of Johnson’s character, especially the more human and affectionate side of his nature."

Perhaps most notable of her achievements is her diary, Thraliana, which was not published until 1949.** It provides insight not only to Johnson's life but, more importantly, the life, thoughts, and observations of a distinct and engaging eighteenth-century woman.

Hester Salusbury Thrale Piozzi died on 2 May 1821, but she had celebrated her eightieth birthday when she was seventy-nine--at a lavish party in Bath attended by some 600 guests!

Ian McIntyre's 2008 Hester: The Remarkable Life of Dr. Johnson's “Dear Mistress” is not only an excellent read but a compelling reassessment of Thrale's life and accomplishment aside from (or in addition to) her friendship with Johnson. 

 

For an introduction, Henry Hitchings’s essay, a review of McIntyre's book, is a good place to start; to access it, click here.

Piozzi's works are available at sites like Project Gutenberg or the Internet Archive. And many, of course, are in print!

*After England adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752, adding eleven days in the process, she celebrated her birthday on 27 January.

**This link now takes you to an archived version of the Thraliana website. 

Fanny Burney and Mothers of the Novel

Fanny Burney (born 13 June 1752)

A few years ago, I was fortunate to have in class a wonderful student who had returned to college after taking several years off. She had a family, a job, and a full load of classes. She also had a problem--she needed one more class in her major so she could graduate at last, and when it came time to register for her final semester, nothing fit into her schedule. She had one other problem too--she was frustrated that she hadn't read any women novelists aside from Jane Austen.

Fanny Burney, c. 1784,
in a portrait by Edward Francisco Burney--
and I want that hat!!

So we sat down to think through an independent study, she bought a copy of Dale Spender's Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers before Jane Austen, and we began putting together a syllabus. As I recall (I'm sure I still have a copy of her proposal on a thumbdrive somewhere, but I'm too lazy to search it out), she put a good ten or twelve novels on her reading list--a number I thought was completely unrealistic--but she wasn't willing to cut down the list. She was excited and ambitious.

She read Aphra Behn's Oronooko and was ready to start on Maria Edgeworth, but then decided to skip ahead to the heftiest book on her desk, Fanny Burney's Camilla, published in 1796. And that was as far as she got on her original list. It wasn't that the novel (which runs to 900 pages in the paperback edition on my shelf) was so long that she couldn't finish it and quit--it was, rather, that once she had raced through it, she was on to the rest of Burney's novels. What had started out as a sort of survey of women novelists turned into an intensive reading of Fanny Burney. And that was fine with me.

I'm sure it would have been fine with Virginia Woolf, too. Of the key role that Burney played for the women writers who would come after her, Woolf famously wrote, "Jane Austen should have laid a wreath upon the grave of Fanny Burney" (from the fourth chapter of A Room of One's Own).

The self-educated Burney had begun her career in "scribbling," as she called it, when she was a child, writing in a journal for her own amusement. She published her first novel, Evelina; Or a History of a Young Woman's Entry into the World, in 1778, writing anonymously and arranging for publication without the knowledge of her father. (Burney wrote in secret and even disguised her handwriting so no one would be able to recognize the manuscript as hers.) The novel was a great success.

Burney went on to write plays, three more novels (the last, The Wanderer, published in 1812), and to continue her journal writing, which extended for some seventy-two years after the first entry, dated 27 March 1768. Although her authorship was revealed shortly after Evelina's publication by George Huddesford in his "Warley, a Satire" (1778), subsequent novels continued to be published without her name. Her next, Cecilia, was written by "the author of Evelina," Camilla "by the author of Evelina and Cecilia," The Wanderer "by the author of Evelina, Cecilia, and Camilla."

In 1810, suffering from pains in her breast, she consulted physicians and was diagnosed with breast cancer. On 30 September 1811, she had a mastectomy, operated on by doctors she described as "7 men in black" and without anaesthesia (for a brief history of surgery before the advent of anaesthesia, click here). Burney survived both breast cancer and surgery--she died on 6 January 1840.

All of Burney's novels are available online today: Evelina and Camilla are at A Celebration of Women Writers, all four are available through Project Gutenberg. In addition, all of the novels are available in affordable paperback editions, like the Oxford World's Classics edition of Evelina I've linked to above.

Claire Harmon's Fanny Burney: A Biography seems to be out of print, but used copies are readily available. Margaret Ann Doody's excellent Frances Burney: The Life in the Works combines biography and careful critical assessment of all Burney's literary output, including the plays, poetry, journals, and letters.