World Premiere:  1770
Last HSO Performance: HSO Premiere
Instrumentation: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, continuo, strings
Duration: 12 minute

Friend of Mozart, Haydn and Metastasio; amateur composer who established an international reputation without ever leaving her native Vienna; gifted singer and harpsichordist who played her own works at court; author of the only symphony written by a woman during the late 18th century; fluent in four languages and superbly educated; hostess of one of the city’s most fashionable musical salons; bachelorette at a time when a woman’s life was defined by her marriage. Marianne Martínez was one of the most talented and anomalous figures of Viennese Classicism. (She was born Anna Katharina Martínez, but is said to have preferred the surname “Martines” because it softened the German pronunciation to something closer to that of her Spanish heritage. She is known equally by both names.)

Martínez was the daughter of a Neapolitan who was secretary to the papal nuncio (ambassador) to the Habsburg Empire. Before he left Naples, her father, Nicolo, had befriended the poet Pietro Trapassi, who was named Poet Laureate to the Habsburg court in 1730 and became celebrated across Europe for his opera librettos under the pen name Pietro Metastasio. He moved in with Nicolo when he arrived in Vienna and spent the rest of his life as a virtual member of the Martínez family. Metastasio, who never married, oversaw the general and musical education of the ten Martínez children with the best available teachers, and found a special protégé with Marianne, born in 1744. There was hardly a better place in Europe for her to learn about music. Also living in their large apartment building, directly across a plaza from the Hofburg, the seat of Habsburg power, was the greatly admired voice teacher Nicolò Porpora and, in a cold and drafty attic, an impoverished young musician named Joseph Haydn. When Marianne showed remarkable musical abilities, Metastasio engaged Porpora to give her voice lessons and Haydn to accompany them and instruct her on keyboard; she studied composition with the Imperial court composer Giuseppe Bonno and Johann Adolph Hasse, then the leading composer of opera seria in Europe, who set more than forty of Metastasio’s texts. 

When Martínez was sixteen, her first Mass was performed at the court chapel. She was summoned by Empress Maria Theresa a year later to appear as a singer and keyboardist and was frequently invited to return throughout her life, often performing her own compositions, whose virtuosity attests to her vocal skills. Martínez continued to compose and perform steadily and enjoyed numerous public and private performances of her compositions, but she never considered doing either professionally, something that would have been frowned upon by her noble class. In 1773, Metastasio sent several of her scores to his friend Padre Giovanni Battista Martini, that era’s most famous teacher of composition, who proposed her for membership in the Bologna Accademia Filarmonico; she was the first woman ever inducted into that venerable society. (Three years earlier, Mozart, then fourteen, studied with Martini on his third Italian tour and also became a member of the Accademia.) When Metastasio died, in 1782, he left Marianne 20,000 florins (several million dollars today), his harpsichord and music library, and in subsequent years she hosted weekly musical soirées attended by Haydn, Mozart (with whom she played four-hand duets), Irish tenor Michael Kelly (Don Basilio and Don Curzio in the May 1786 premiere of The Marriage of Figaro) and other notables; in the 1790s, she started a successful singing school. Her last public appearance was on March 27, 1808 at a performance of Haydn’s oratorio The Creation in honor of his 76th birthday. In a biographical symmetry that would have pleased the rational thought of that humanistic era, that event was also the last public appearance of Joseph Haydn, Marianne’s first teacher, when he was lionized by nobility, music lovers and another of his students, Ludwig van Beethoven. Marianne Martínez died in Vienna of tuberculosis on December 13, 1812.

Martínez is thought to have composed some 200 works, though many of her manuscripts were destroyed in a fire in 1927. Her extant compositions include four Masses, sacred works for chorus and for solo voice, Italian arias (all on texts of Metastasio), secular solo cantatas, four harpsichord concertos, three harpsichord sonatas and one symphony. Other than two keyboard sonatas, none of these works was published during Martínez’s lifetime. Despite the skill with which they were created and the acceptance they received, her works faded quickly from notice after her death, when her conservative idiom was superseded by the heightened expression of the Romantic Age. She was rediscovered by scholars in the 1990s, and in recent years many of her works have been published (most notably by Furore-Verlag, a German publisher specializing in works by women composers), several have been recorded, and a full-length study of her life and music by Indiana University of Pennsylvania professor Irving Godt was published in 2010. 

Martínez’s Symphony in C major (1770) is modeled on the compact fast–slow–fast form of the Italian opera overture. (The manuscript is titled “Ouverture.”) The first movement is in a sonata form modified in that the vigorous main theme is omitted from the recapitulation, which includes just the delicate, trilling second subject from the exposition; a brief developmental episode using both ideas occupies the middle of the movement. The Andante, lyrical and graceful, returns the opening strains to close the movement. The finale is in two parts, each repeated. The second part recalls the spirited opening theme but with a darker expressive character.