Marianna Martines: A Woman Composer in the Vienna of Mozart and Haydn.

Alexander, Peter M.

Marianna Martines: A Woman Composer in the Vienna of Mozart and Haydn. By Irving Godt. Edited and with contributions by John A. Rice. (Eastman Studies in Music.) Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2010. [xvi, 299 p. ISBN 9781580463515. $75.] Music examples, appendices, bibliography, index.

Marianna Martines (1744-1812) is one of the most intriguing figures of hue eighteenth-century Vienna. A talented singer, keyboard player, and composer, she was the pupil of the acclaimed librettist Metasiasio, 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 Ffaydn, 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 Compose 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 Martincs from "a critical tradition hostile to die music of Martincs 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 Hiklesheimer (Mozart [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1994]), and through him the exaggerated portrayal of Mo/art in Peter Schaffer's play Amadeus and the subsequent film directed by Milos Forman.

Pichler, who was of a younger generation than Marti nes, casually disparaged the older woman's music, saying she found it not uto 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, Pichlcr's opinion was passed on through Robert Eitner and Eduard Hanslick in the nineteenth century and even into the first edition of The Nexo 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 of individual works. The musical descriptions call upon some of the most recent scholarship in classic style and theory--clearly one of Rice's contributions, since several sources cited in the bibliography were published after Godt had submitted his original typescript. Especially noteworthy is the extensive use of Robert O. Gjerdingen's research into partimenti--musical gestures built upon well-known bass patterns--as described in his Music in the Galant Style (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), as well as ideas based upon James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy's Elements of Sonata Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

Godt and Rice wear their learning lightly, however. Indeed, one of the valuable features of Marianna Marlines is that, with no compromise in scholarship, it can be read and appreciated by nompeciallsts. Discussion of historical subjects and musical style often include explanations that both reflect the authors' extensive scholarly knowledge and make the subject approachable. Without relying on overly technical language or condescending to any readers, these discussions strike an admirable balance between accuracy and accessibility. As examples, read the discussion of the Tonkimstlet'-Sozietat on pages 180-81, or the following passage, which is part of a useful introduction to the solo cantata:

 The Italian solo cantata--an elaborate soliloquy, often on
 a pastoral subject, consisting of two (or less commonly three)
 arias connected by recitatives--was one of the most important
 vocal genres of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
 centuries. Alessandro Scarlatti wrote more than 600 cantatas,
 Francesco Mancini more than 200, Nicola Porpora more than 180,
 and Handel about 100. ... Even in the early nineteenth century,
 when the Italian solo cantata was largely extinct, composers
 such as Beethoven (La Tempesta, ca. 1801) and Mendelssohn
 (Che vuoi, mio cor, ca. 1821) continued to set Metastases
 cantata texts to music for use as a concert scene.
 Metastasio wrote most of his cantata texts in Vienna, and the
 Viennese court for which he worked cultivated the Italian
 cantata longer than most other musical centers (p. 200).

The full six paragraphs from which this passage is taken form a concise, well grounded, and thoughtful introduction to a little-known topic. In a passage that would be helpful to many music students, the solo cantata is concisely defined, there is a brief history that underlines the significance of the genre in the eighteenth century, and the cantata is placed in the unique environment of Martines' Vienna. This is an ideal approach to historical writing, and could serve as a model for just about any field in the humanities.

Godt and Rice make several other choices that serve to make the book useful to both lay readers and scholars. For example, all quotations from letters and other primary documents are given in English in the main text, with the full original text in the appendix. Likewise, any documents in the appendix that are not quoted in the main text appear in both English and the original in the appendix. This helpful way of dealing with documentary evidence obviously makes the book accessible to a larger audience.

Nor dot eh authors fail to grasp the significance of Martines' career as a female composer in a society that did not welcome women into professional roles. This is unsurprising, since, as Rice remarks in his editor's note, he too has worked "on a project about another female musician, Empress Marie Therese" (empress Marie Therese and Music at the Viennese Court, 1792-1807 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003]). But Godt was too good a scholar not a to have sensitive to Martines's place in Viennese society, and there are many helpful reminders of the ineluctable reality that she faced. Read especially chapter 7 on "Family honors and Private Music Making," the introduction to chapter 6 on "Padre Martini and the Dixit Dominus," and the following carefully nuanced passage near the end of the same chapter, with its insightful distinction between the composer and her compositions:

 The persistent allusions to the weakness of her sex from the
 composer of the splendid Dixit Dominies may strike some as a bit
 disingenuous; but those were very different times. Regardless
 of what she might have thought privately, Marianna's position
 in court society imposed on her a total public acceptance of
 contemporary values. The woman's compositions might make light
 of those restrictions, but the composer, as a woman could not.
 (p. 153)

There are similar insights into musical and social realities of the times throughout the book, making it a valuable addition to the extensive literature on music in late-eighteenth-century Vienna.

Of course, no book is without flaws. One wishes that the catalog of Martines's works had been thematic; the index could have been more extensive; the picture of Martines's musical style emerges largely from the discussion of individual works rather than a focused overview of her style, including such issues as orchestration, texture, and structure, which would have placed her more music more securely in the well known developments of the time.

It is expected at this point in a book review to write that such flaws are minor (as is indeed the case here), and we should all be grateful for the volume at hand. In this case that judgment is more than justified. Marianna Marlines covers a subject that has been overlooked too long, and it does so with great insight, illuminating the composer, her works, and her social milieu, all in a volume of a little more than 200 actual pages of text. The book's accessibility raises the hope that it will help make Martines known to a larger music-loving public.

PETER M ALEXANDER

University of Iowa