Sovereign Feminine. Matthew Head
melodies and reminds us of Burney’s preference, in the 1770s at least, for another Saxon, Hasse (with whom Walpurgis studied and later collaborated).60 Conversation with Hasse and his spouse, the soprano Faustina Bordoni (then in her seventies), discovered in Handel’s music traces of unreformed male manners: his accompaniments asserted too much learning, and his melodies sometimes lacked refinement.61
In Walpurgis, Burney encountered a living muse already fully established in that exalted guise through her reception and self-fashioning. Her reception ranged as far as Germany and Italy and involved the celebration of numerous aspects of modernity: innovations in music printing; patriotic celebration of female achievement; neoclassical aesthetics, and arguments in favor of despotism. What better work than Walpurgis’s Il trionfo della Fedeltà to announce a new, more commercially viable method of music printing? With the edition of her opera published in 1756 by G.I. Breitkopf (“inventore di questa nuova maniera di stampar la Musica”) Walpurgis stimulated and authorized an explosion in composing and publishing music in German-speaking territory.62 Her mythologization had begun a decade earlier, on the occasion of her marriage in Leipzig (on 10 October 1747) to the elector of Bavaria, Friedrich Christian. In his eulogy, subsequently printed by Breitkopf, Johann Christoph Gottsched, the self-appointed reformer of German language and letters, likened Walpurgis to Minerva and reminded his audience that the ancients chose (female) muses to inspire the arts, just as they chose a goddess, not a god, to oversee the realms of “Wissenschaft und Weisheit” (knowledge and science).63 Gottsched prefaced a flattering note to the first edition of Walpurgis’s Talestri.64 Later he translated the libretti of both of Walpurgis’s operas into German as a homage to their author and, presumably, as models for native poets.65
Gottsched’s celebration of Walpurgis was just as stylized and programmatic as his earlier support of Bach’s Leipzig librettist Marianne von Ziegler had been. Both women were to serve as signs that German letters could achieve the kinds of modern refinement associated with the “femmes forte,” or “précieuse,” of the Parisian salons of the late seventeenth century. As Goodman has discussed, Gottsched’s initial promotion of and collaboration with von Ziegler (whose salon took place in a controversially grand, French-style residence in Leipzig) projected her as a literary Amazon who usurps male privilege and reforms male manners in literary print culture. However, the French-inspired model of the literary Amazon proved untenable in Leipzig, and by 1734, Goodman reported, Gottsched “was tiring of this role.”66 After his marriage to Louise Kulmus he switched to a different model of female literary activity, informed by the structure of guilds and preserving the traditional hierarchy of husband and wife. Kulmus endorsed this model, working as her husband’s “Gehülfin” (apprentice) and critical of von Ziegler’s strategy. At this point the story breaks off, and Goodman leaves us with the impression that the guild-like and native model of the female apprentice achieved permanent hegemony. But Gottsched’s promotion of Walpurgis reveals that something of the Amazonian model continued, at least in relation to a sovereign, whom Gottsched figured as an autonomous leader in German letters.
Walpurgis also cultivated this identity, most obviously in her opera Talestri on the theme of the Amazon queen. Here Walpurgis deployed the often decorative notion of sovereign femininity to precise political ends. Within a plot that offers (conventionally for the genre) an argument for reformed or enlightened despotism, Walpurgis employed the figure of woman (in the guise of the Amazon queen Talestri) as a reforming, moralizing force.67 A brief digression into the plot shows how this is worked out. The three-act opera seria opens on the day of Talestri’s coronation as queen of the Amazons, a bellicose, man-hating tribe at war with the neighboring Scythians. As part of her investiture Talestri must join her people in swearing hatred of all men, but, secretly, she is in love with Oronte, a Scythian prince. Oronte, returning Talestri’s love, is captured, and the high priestess Tomiri orders him to be sacrificed as part of the coronation celebrations. In a politically eloquent twist to the plot Talestri asserts her absolute power—only she can decide if Oronte is to die, thus elevating the throne over the church (act 2, sc. 5). Nonetheless, the message and Oronte’s fate are softened when it is revealed that Oronte was born to an Amazon mother (in fact, to the high priestess). The love of Talestri and Oronte inaugurates a reconciliation of the Amazons and Scythians and an era of peace. Without amounting to an entirely unambiguous celebration of female sovereignty—after all, this is a love story as well as political tract—the plot intimates that reform and progress arise from Talestri’s exemplary character. The old order, characterized by hostility between the sexes, gives way to a feminized but still absolutist social order. Nowhere else in Burney’s Tours was the notion of female sovereignty deployed with such ideological force.
That force is felt in an enduring monument to Walpurgis, female ascendance, neoclassicism, and (not least) fawning praise of aristocrats, published in Italian by the Spanish theorist Antonio Eximeno. In the preface to his treatise Dell’origine e delle regole della musica, published in 1774, one year after Burney’s German tour, Eximeno found in the plot of Talestri an example of female virtue, a rebuff to critics of the female sex, and evidence that Walpurgis herself, his dedicatee, brought about peace by uniting countries and languages. Not for the last time, a female emblem elevated the art of music.
Eximeno’s praise of Walpurgis, though taking the generic form of flattery of a social superior, includes a broader program: the vindication of the fair sex against old-fashioned prejudices. Already in the preface Eximeno states that Walpurgis dispelled superstitious beliefs about innate female inferiority: “Your Sovereign Parents, completely free from the usual vulgar prejudice about female upbringing, gave you full liberty to cultivate your soul with the study of science and the arts of taste: and You, without neglecting the duties of a wise Sovereign, have thus acquired these skills to perfection, so that the most discerning Professors have no choice but to consider you a rare wonder of your sex.”68
FIGURE 3. Maria Antonia Walpurgis, title page of Antonio Eximeno, Dell’origine e delle regole della musica (1774). Reproduced with permission of the British Library.
More than just a dedicatee, Walpurgis appears in Eximeno’s treatise as the author’s second self. A title-page engraving depicted Walpurgis as the goddess Minerva, surrounded by various props associated with the twelve muses of Apollo—musical instruments, a painter’s palette with brushes, and a compass. She is also shown with the scores of her operas and a copy of Eximeno’s treatise (figure 3). This living muse possesses even the work in which she is celebrated. She does so, perhaps, because she is a perfected version of the human, a whole uniting all perfections: “Now, YOUR HIGHNESS, allow me to lament with You the too great humiliation that You give to our sex: all the virtues, that when unevenly distributed among men make them intolerant and arrogant, in You alone are re-united, and accompanied by that modest and Regal affability for which the Roman citizens loved You when You honoured them with your presence.”69
In Talestri Eximeno discovered both political and music-theoretical ideals that ultimately ennobled his writing and his chosen art of music. He read the plot of the opera as an argument in favor of both female sovereignty and the institution of reformed absolutism: “[Y]ou attain respect and admiration not just for the vastness of your intellect but also for the greatness of your heart: in the drama of Talestri, which takes as its topic the eternal conflict between the Amazons and men, after the most ingenious criticism of the tyrannical arrogance exercised by men over females, you generously forgive us and bring together the two sexes in peaceful agreement.”70 He also included an aria from Talestri as an example of the eternal beauty and affective power of the “fundamental bass,” a theoretical construct derived from Rameau that he portrayed as the culmination of music-historical progress and a sign of modern perfection:
We should listen to the Aria together with the rest of the Dramma, in order to understand the majestic control that this princess has over music and over the affect of our hearts. . . . Nevertheless, just by looking at the music it is possible to see that, even in absence of other proofs, the aria alone