Marianna Martines (1744–1812) and Sara Levy née Itzig (1761–1854) are the subjects of two recently published books that bring to light solidly researched and hitherto unpublished or little-known empirical documentation of the lives and achievements of these exceptionally musical eighteenth-century women. Martines was born in Vienna into a highly respectable middle-class family of Neapolitan descent, and from an early age earned the admiration of music lovers and of internationally renowned musicians and scholars. She was recognized equally as a composer, singer and keyboard player, not only in her native city but also in Naples, Bologna, London (Charles Burney's impressions of the young musician are cited extensively) and elsewhere in Europe. Berlin-born Levy, the daughter of the Jewish court financier Daniel Itzig, one of the wealthiest men in Prussia at the time, was known among the city's intellectual salon circles and among professional musicians active in northern Germany as an extraordinary harpsichord player, avid music collector and generous patroness, with a particular affinity for the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and his sons. Both Martines and Levy exemplify the rise of new social elites in Europe during the mid-eighteenth century: Martines's family was ennobled in 1774, largely because of her brother Joseph's services to the Empire and his movement in aristocratic circles. Levy's family, meanwhile, belonged to a newly emergent Jewish bourgeoisie that embraced the values of German Enlightenment and the concept of Bildung and joined the upper crust of Berlin's rising urban elite; in 1799 Levy's father was the first Prussian Jew to be granted citizenship as a reward for his financial services to the crown, a title extended to his descendents, including the then married (and widowed) Sara Levy. Both women also enjoyed superb education: Martines was trained and mentored from early childhood by the celebrated poet Pietro Metastasio, at whose house the Martines family resided, while Levy's thorough liberal education included music tuition from Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, reflecting both the financial means and the sociocultural aspirations of her family and their milieu. As independent mature women, Martines and Levy regularly held private musical gatherings or salons and house concerts in their native cities, attracting the presence and participation of both music lovers and dilettantes, as well as of leading professional musicians, including Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
The monograph on Marianna Martines's life and works by the late Irving Godt is the result of the author's long years of thorough research carried out in numerous libraries and archives across Europe. The typescript left by Godt was eventually prepared for publication and edited by John A. Rice, who also increased the number of music examples from Martines's compositions, many of which remain unpublished in modern editions (xi). Drawing on a wealth of documentary materials, this book offers for the first time a full record of Martines's works, putting together a rich portrait of ‘one of the most accomplished and highly honored female musicians of her century’ (2).
The book is divided into nine chapters, followed by four appendices. It opens, in the first chapter, by locating Martines's circle of family members and educators in mid-eighteenth-century Vienna, mapping, in the second chapter, the social circumstances that shaped her upbringing and especially her musical education, supervised by Metastasio and undertaken at an early stage by the young Joseph Haydn. Chapters 3 to 9 discuss Martines's life events and compositional output in chronological order, following the development of genres and style in her works. Each of these chapters reveals further aspects of the life of Martines as a composer and the phases of her personal development by interweaving analytical discussions of selected works with the story of the circumstances that led to or facilitated their composition, the reception of Martines's oeuvre, and her place within an international network of scholars and musicians who valued her creative output. Thus chapter 3 deals with early works, including masses, motets and keyboard sonatas; Italian arias, choral liturgical works and instrumental chamber music for domestic performance are discussed in chapter 4, the four Italian psalm settings in chapter 5 and Martines's setting of the Dixit Dominus in chapter 6. The Dixit Dominus was the piece she submitted for the Accademia Filarmonica in Bologna in 1774 following her admittance as its first female member the previous year. Chapter 7 turns to keyboard concertos, probably intended for private domestic performances at Martines's Akademien, and the Litany for the Blessed Virgin Mary, and chapter 8 discusses the oratorio Isacco Figura del Redentore, the only work performed publicly during Martines's lifetime (in 1782, the year of Metastasio's death); solo cantatas, composed in the 1780s and 1790s and probably intended specifically for performance at private musical gatherings or Akademien, are covered in chapter 9. The appendices include a list of the Martines family members; transcriptions of Marianna's original correspondence, with Padre Martini regarding her membership at the Academia Filarmonica, as well as with Farinelli (the singer Carlo Broschi), whom she never met in person, Aurelio Bertola and Charles Burney; Metastasio's will, which attests to his tight family-like relations with the Martines family, especially with Marianna, to whom he bequeathed money and his entire music library, and with her brother Joseph; and a detailed list of Marianna's works with modern editions, where available. The analysis of specific works in the main chapters of the book is illustrated with detailed music examples and accompanied by assessments of the recognition and reception of Martines's compositional achievements. Godt's book is thus notable for the systematic, well-structured presentation of the rich material on which it draws, emphatically refuting the nineteenth-century view, largely disseminated by the Viennese novelist and Mozart pupil Caroline Pichler, that disregarded Martines's compositional achievements.
Sara Levy has appeared primarily on the margins of music scholarship as a patroness of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and as one of a number of salonnières active in Berlin around 1800, in the wake of the attempted German-Jewish civil emancipation. Contemporaneous accounts describe her as an impressive lady noted more for her exceptional talent as an amateur harpsichordist and music patroness than for her sociability, conversational skills or beauty. Peter Wollny's book, part of the Bach-Archiv series Beiträge zur Geschichte der Bach-Rezeption, provides a well-documented overview of Levy's hitherto little-explored musical persona, emphasizing her agency in the cultivation and preservation of Johann Sebastian Bach's music. Wollny draws primarily on the music collections and subscriptions of Levy and a few other members of the Itzig family, as well as on some records in contemporaneous documents that attest to Levy's cultivation of Bach's music as collector and patroness of musicians associated with the Bach tradition.
The book is divided into three main parts. The first is an essay on Levy's activities as music patroness, collector and amateur performer in the context of the concentric circles in which she operated: the private circle of her family and the social milieu of both Jewish and Christian intellectuals and music connoisseurs, the wider circle of Berlin's public musical life, and the professional musicians and institutions that she patronized (particularly Bach's two elder sons and the then newly founded Sing-Akademie zu Berlin). The second part contains transcriptions of four documents that attest to Levy's patronage of contemporaneous professional musicians, including her will and personal correspondence with Johann Adam Hiller (at the time Thomaskantor in Leipzig) and Emanuel Bach's widow. The third and largest part offers detailed inventories of the music collections of Levy and other members of the Itzig family. Three appendix-like sections follow, providing a combined genealogical tree of the Itzig and related Mendelssohn families, a biographical glossary and a timeline.
Wollny's book constitutes a significant contribution to the scholarship of Bach reception, emphasizing the continuity with which Sebastian Bach's music was both preserved and intensely cultivated during the last third of the eighteenth century. Among the small group of musicians, music theorists and connoisseurs responsible, several members of the Itzig family (and later the related Mendelssohns) played important roles as patrons, collectors and indeed performers. As Wollny points out (45), by contrast with the cultivation of Bach's music in the nineteenth century, Levy and the Itzig family participated in a tradition based almost exclusively on personal relationships with the composer's sons, pupils and followers. Offering what is hitherto the most substantial documentation of Levy's activities as patron, collector and performer, this book paves the way for future investigation of key issues that it merely hints at: for example, the relationship between the cultivation of Bach's music among the German-Jewish circle of the Itzig family and its later public revival in Germany, heralded by the 1829 performance of the St Matthew Passion at Berlin's Sing-Akademie promoted and conducted by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Sara Levy's great nephew. On the other hand, and by contrast with Martines, Levy seems not to have left any compositions of her own or to have engaged in singing. While this discrepancy might stem from traditional Jewish decrees that ban women from singing in the presence of men or from the novelty of female musical practice within the Jewish community (to which Levy remained loyal throughout her life), it remains for the reader to wonder whether Levy's musical training did not include at least basic vocal and compositional skills, which were otherwise indispensable to any early modern and eighteenth-century music curriculum.
While both Martines and Levy were prevented from gaining the status of professional musicians by their gender and social station, they were nevertheless able not only to become accomplished in the art of music, but also to gain an unmistakable measure of agency through the support of male intermediaries – music teachers, fathers or mentors – as well as through the social institution of the salon, which by the last third of the eighteenth century had become, both in Berlin and in Vienna, a framework that permitted educated women to participate in public discourses, aesthetic deliberation and indeed musical performance without compromising social conventions. Although both Godt and Wollny stop short of addressing such aspects as the significance of these two extraordinary women as agents of musical culture, and as potential models of female subjectivity within their respective social networks, such questions can now be explored further on the solid basis provided by these two books, both of which will undoubtedly appeal to a wide readership among scholars of eighteenth-century studies.
