Sovereign Feminine. Matthew Head
topos of the living muse may represent public acknowledgement of female achievement in the arts, even an early form of female celebrity, in the Republic of Letters, but female empowerment (as the “indexical theory” predicts) is a rich political signifier.37 In Samuel’s The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain the title already announces the national interest at stake in images of female excellence. Specifically, Britain is figured as heir to the cultural authority of classical antiquity: Apollo crowns Britannia. The timeless dignity of classical costume, the “fantasy of continuity” between antiquity and the present, do not conceal the images’ celebration of their historical moment.38 Now conversing, now absorbed in thought, at once audience and author, these refined subjects develop their artistic and intellectual gifts without the fetters of tyranny. An element of fashion—in the decorative motif of the living muses, employed by Josiah Wedgewood’s jasperware in the same decade—hints at the broader discursive context of luxury and trade.39
MARIANNE MARTINEZ AS ST. CECILIA
The singer and actress Mrs. Sheridan occupies the center of Samuel’s images, arguably setting music at the heart of British culture. Her lyre and heavenward gaze variously suggest Terpsichore, Orpheus, and (in the painted version Portraits in the Character of the Muses) Apollo himself, who occupies an analogous position in the canvas and holds the same instrument. Perhaps, through Mrs. Sheridan’s placement, music is subtly accorded a special status, a medium mediating the realms of the ideal and the worldly; paradoxically it is not painting but (musical) performance that Samuel privileges in images that hover between portraits of celebrities and allegories of art.
Elizabeth Sheridan introduced into Samuel’s apparently unruffled imagery one of the most romantic and adventuresome biographies of the period. Elizabeth was about twenty-four when Portraits in the Character of the Muses was hung at the Royal Academy and already then retired from the stage. She was born in 1754 to the composer Thomas Linley, who trained her from childhood for a musical- theatrical career. Her celebrity rested in part on the mirroring of her life in the works in which she appeared, both unfolding according to fashionable romantic plots. In 1771 a play in the Haymarket, The Maid of Bath, dramatized her reluctant engagement to Walter Long (a strategic alliance engineered by her father). The onstage action, highlighting her predicament, preceded the real theater, when, in 1772, the year she was painted by Gainsborough with her sister Mary (as The Linley Sisters), she eloped to France with Richard Sheridan.
Elizabeth Sheridan received a vivid mention in the fourth volume of Burney’s General History, where she is described as a “charming” and “talented” singer who knew a trick by which she could sing up to an octave beyond her natural compass—as far as B♭ above “top” C. There is also a reference to “Miss Linley” (meaning Elizabeth) in connection with extremely high remuneration from concerts.40 But it was Marianne von Martinez (1744–1812), an orphan of Spanish ancestry, whom Burney mythologized in his Tours as an embodiment of music, a “young lady . . . well dressed, and [of] very elegant appearance.” She pursued her art under the guidance of Metastasio, the “divine poet,” in the rarefied atmosphere of an upper story of the librettist’s house, Kohlmarkt 11, in Vienna’s first district, a setting that stimulated Burney’s imagination.41 It took Burney over a hundred pages of toing and froing in Vienna before he finally declared Martinez to be “St. Cecilia,” but he worked toward that from the moment he introduced his readers to the imperial poet and his ward.42
Kohlmarkt 11 entered music-historical lore at the turn of the century with the earliest biographies of Haydn by Georg August Griesinger and Albert Christoph Dies, and through Michael Kelly’s Reminiscences, published in 1826.43 Kelly described Martinez’s salons in the 1780s, evening soirées attended by Mozart, with whom Marianna performed Wolfgang’s four-hand sonatas.44 But the mythologization of Metastasio’s house began already with Burney’s Tours, where the (now familiar) connection to Apollo and his muses is hammered home: residing “up no less than four flights of stairs,” Metastasio is said to live “somewhat on a level with Mount Parnassus, nearer [his] sire Apollo.”45 If in England such heights are “thought only fit for domestics to sleep in, [Metastasio] has, nevertheless, an exceeding good and elegant apartment, in which an imperial laureate may, with all due dignity, hold dalliance with the Muses.”46
Marianne Martinez was chief among those muses—one who did not invisibly inspire the poet but musically realized his creations. The notion of the sister arts is fundamental to understanding the relationship. In the German Tours Burney introduced Metastasio as a refining force in music, not as a lyric poet alone: “[His] writings have perhaps more contributed to the refinement of vocal melody, and, consequently, of music in general, than the joint efforts of all great composers in Europe.”47 Soon after, Burney introduced Martinez as Metastasio’s protégé and the greatest living musician in the world.48 Whether or not Burney believed her to be so is irrelevant; the statement functions to remove all constraints on what is presented as an experiment. For the encounter with Metastasio and Martinez answers a question about which theorists could only speculate—how does the ideal union of poetry and music sound? Burney framed the crucial visit to Kohlmarkt 11 like a chemist writing a paper on the mixture of elements: “I was extremely curious to know what kind of music would best fulfil [sic] the ideas of Metastasio, when applied to his own poetry; and imagined that this young lady, with all the advantages of his instructions, counsel, and approbation, combined with her own genius, must be an alter idem, and that her productions would include every musical embellishment which could be superadded to this poetry, without destroying or diminishing its native beauty.”49
In ordinary circumstances Burney looked to the Metastasio settings of Hasse for worldly models of that perfection, but Martinez offered a glimpse of a higher synthesis of words and music, of ancient and modern idioms, comprising not fully fledged operas, written for particular occasions, tailored to specific personnel, but miscellaneous arias and psalms (translated by Metastasio), conceived and, crucially for Burney, performed in the neutral, aesthetic laboratory of Kohlmarkt 11. Here Burney found in Martinez’s music a neoclassical principle of harmonious reconciliation. After pondering the schism between the operatic factions of Hasse–Metastasio and Gluck–Calsabigi, between the old and the new, Burney found in one of Martinez’s psalm settings (a suitably timeless and spiritually elevated context) the perfect reconciliation of antico e moderno:
Mademoiselle Martinez was at her musical studies, and writing; she directly complied with my request, of sitting down to the harpsichord. Metastasio desired her to shew me some of her best studies; and she produced a psalm for four voices, with instruments. It was a most agreeable Mescolanza, as Metastasio called it, of antico e moderno; a mixture of the harmony, and contrivance of old times, with the melody and taste of the present. It was an admirable composition, and she played and sung it in a very masterly manner, contriving so well to fill up all the parts, that though it was a full piece, nothing seemed wanting. The words of this psalm were Italian, and of Metastasio’s translation.50
Burney praised Martinez as a composer in a range of genres, including sacred counterpoint, but praise turned to veneration when the topic turned to Italian opera. In this context Martinez emerged as a singing monument to the aesthetic ideals of midcentury opera seria with which Burney was preoccupied during his Tours, perhaps because of the prestige and significance of that genre in London, and perhaps because of Burney’s sense that the tradition was dying out. In her Italian arias Martinez displayed the authorial restraint Burney felt that composers owed to the voice, and, here again, she found the middle course between convention and novelty: the arias were “very well written, in a modern style; but neither common, nor unnaturally new. The words were well set, the melody was simple, and great room was left for expression and embellishment.”51 But what really captured Burney’s imagination was her manner of singing, “which no longer subsists elsewhere.” Burney recorded the elements of this vanishing vocal tradition with particular precision:
Her voice and manner of singing, both delighted and astonished me! I can readily subscribe to what Metastasio says, that it is a style of singing which no longer subsists elsewhere, as it requires too much pains and patience for modern professors. . . . I should suppose that