4 minute read
Musical Queens
By Rebecca Cypess
Europe, in the second half of the eighteenth century, saw the rise of numerous powerful queens: the Habsburg Empress Maria Theresa, her daughter Marie Antoinette of France, Queen Charlotte of England, Catherine the Great of Russia, and others. Navigating their positions as women of authority required careful self-fashioning within accepted paradigms of womanhood that allowed their subjects and peers to respect and honor them.
Seraphic Fire’s March 2025 program explores music in Vienna during the reign of Empress Maria Theresa, who became a patron to numerous women artists whose brilliance reflected well on her. Among these artists was the composer Marianna Martines, who achieved international renown when she became the first woman inducted into the Accademia filarmonica of Bologna in 1773. Because of her family’s friendship with the imperial court poet Pietro Metastasio, the leading operatic librettist of the eighteenth century, Martines had the opportunity to perform for the empress and her daughters. Martines was a virtuosic singer and keyboardist as well as a prolific composer of instrumental and vocal music, much of which she performed herself. She regularly hosted musical soirées in her home that attracted guests from the local intelligentsia, professional artists, and aristocrats, as well as international visitors, all of whom came to hear her. Among these guests was the English music historian Charles Burney, who gushed about Martines’s performances and compared her to St. Cecilia, patron saint of music.
All of Martines’s surviving Italian cantatas are set to texts penned by Metastasio. This includes “Berenice, che fai?,” the text of which derives from Metastasio’s operatic libretto Antigono. The story revolves around the Egyptian princess Berenice, who is betrothed to the Macedonian king Antigono, but who is in love with his son Demetrio. Martines chose for this cantata a highly dramatic excerpt in which Berenice appears insane with rage. The original audience for this work would no doubt have known that the story ends happily—Berenice is ultimately allowed to marry Demetrio—but they would have reveled in seeing her temporary madness, a condition widely associated with women in the eighteenth century.
Martines’s sacred motet “O Virgo, cui salute” is dedicated to Mary, another archetypal “queen” who served as a paradigm of womanhood. The piece is composed of a recitative, an aria, another recitative, and a concluding Alleluia, and it includes an obbligato oboe part that offers a counterpoint to the soprano soloist. While, in theory, women were not allowed to perform in church, they did so occasionally, as Burney recounted after he visited Vienna’s
St. Stephen’s Church. The presence of a set of performing parts for this motet in the archive of St. Michael’s Church suggests that the piece was performed there, perhaps by Martines herself. Seraphic Fire's performance is a modern world premiere of this motet, based on an edition by musicologist Lynette Bowring.
Vienna’s musical life depended on the collaboration and competition of its leading artists. In an autobiographical letter, Martines recalled that, in her youth, she had studied keyboard with Franz Joseph Haydn. In the 1780s, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart attended Martines’s soirées and played keyboard duets with her. On Seraphic Fire's program, works by Haydn and Mozart complement Martines’s compositions.
Mozart’s “Laudate Dominum,” from his Solemn Vespers, K. 339, was composed in 1780 for performance in the Salzburg Cathedral. In a melody that soars above the orchestra, the soprano soloist pronounces a Latin translation of Psalm 117, which calls on all people to praise God; her invocation is answered by the chorus. Mozart wrote his Missa brevis, K. 192, when he was just 18 years old. Its Credo movement is unified by a recurring four-note theme (Do-ReFa-Mi), which he would later use as the basis of the finale of his last symphony, “Jupiter” (No. 41).
The title of Franz Joseph Haydn’s Symphony No. 63, “La Roxelane,” refers to the work’s second movement, which is a musical portrait of another queen: Roxelane, wife of Suleiman the Magnificent, a sixteenth-century sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Attempting to understand the meaning of Haydn’s title, scholars have suggested that he composed incidental music to accompany a German adaptation of the play Soliman II by the French writer Charles Favart, which was performed in Vienna throughout the 1770s. However, this suggestion is speculative; no such work survives.
Rebecca Cypess is The Mordecai D. Katz and Dr. Monique C. Katz Dean of the Undergraduate Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Yeshiva University.
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