‘More perfect than any singer I have heard.’

Irving Godt was already working on his book about Marianna Martines when he met John Rice in the late 1990s. When Godt died towards the end of 2006, his daughter asked Rice to revise the typescript for publication by the University of Rochester Press. As he says in the Editor’s Note to the book, “I welcomed this opportunity to contribute to an important project and to the memories of a talented and accomplished composer and a knowledgeable and tenacious scholar.’

Here is an edited extract from the Introduction which demonstrates both her reputation among her contemporaries and the sort of barriers that existed for female artists of the time:

The music historian Charles Burney spent several weeks in Vienna in 1772. One of his most cherished ambitions was to meet the court poet Pietro Metastasio, whose librettos, set to music hundreds of times, had helped to shape the music of his age. But once in the presence of the great dramatist, Burney found his attention distracted by the entrance of a young woman, “who was received by the whole company with great respect. She was well dressed, and had a very elegant appearance.” This was Marianna Martines, whose family had lived with Metastasio for about forty years and whose education he had supervised. She had developed quickly into a fine singer, keyboard player, and composer, and was now, at the age of twenty-eight, at the height of her creative powers.

Martines’s singing left Burney at a loss for words:

To say that her voice was naturally well-toned and sweet, that she had an excellent shake, a perfect intonation, a facility of executing the most rapid and difficult passages, and a touching expression, would be to say no more than I have already said, and with truth, of others; but here I want words that would still encrease the significance and energy of these expressions. The Italian augmentatives would, perhaps, gratify my wish, if I were writing in that language; but as that is not the case, let me only add, that in the portamento, and divisions of tones and semi-tones into infinitely minute parts, and yet always stopping upon the exact fundamental, Signora Martinetz was more perfect than any singer I had ever heard: her cadences too, of this kind, were very learned, and truly pathetic and pleasing.

After these two songs, she played a very difficult lesson [i.e., sonata], of her own composition, on the harpsichord, with great rapidity and precision. She has composed a Miserere, in four parts, with several psalms, in eight parts, and is a most excellent contrapuntist.

The woman who charmed Burney so completely, impressing him as both a performer and a composer, was one of the most accomplished and highly honoured female musicians of her century. Her first music teacher was the young Joseph Haydn. Vienna knew her as a gifted aristocratic singer and keyboard player who performed for the pleasure of the Empress Maria Theresa. The great composer Johann Adolf Hasse praised her singing, keyboard playing, and composition. The regular private concerts she held in her home attracted the presence and the participation of some of Vienna’s leading musicians; Mozart enjoyed playing keyboard duets with her. She composed prolifically and in a wide variety of genres, vocal and instrumental, writing church music, oratorios, Italian arias, sonatas, and concertos. Those who study, perform, and listen to her music today will understand easily why it captivated Burney.

Yet a few decades after her death a critical tradition hostile to the music of Martines and to women composers in general began to influence opinion. The prolific Viennese novelist Caroline Pichler was herself an accomplished musician in her youth, having studied with Mozart. She took part in private musical events given by her father in the 1790s, when Martines presided over one of Vienna’s most celebrated musical salons. (Thus she had reason to think of Martines as a rival.)

In memoirs published in 1844, a year after her death, Pichler gave notice to two female composers: the blind pianist Maria Theresia von Paradis and Martines. Pichler was ten years younger than Paradis, twenty-five years younger than Martines. Her musical tastes were clearly those of a generation different from Marianna’s; but she expressed no great fondness for the music of Paradis either: “I found neither her compositions nor those of Fräulein Martinez (the only works by female composers that were known to me) to be of much interest.” This statement led Pichler to a short disquisition on female composers:

It is an altogether strange observation . . . that not a single woman has yet succeeded in distinguishing herself as a creative musician. There are successful women painters and poets, and if not a single woman in any art or science has ever achieved as much as men have, they have nevertheless made significant strides forward. But not in music. And yet one would think that this art, which demands the least preliminary study and more feeling and imagination than the other arts, would be the proper medium in which the female spirit might express itself.

She went on to disparage not only Marianna but the whole sisterhood of women composers, beginning with a rhetorically useful concession that Paradis and Martines wrote some good music:

Both produced fine things, but not at the highest—indeed not even at the middle level, while women in painting and poetry, even if they have produced nothing comparable to the works of the leading masters in these crafts, have brought forth valuable things without any allowance for their sex. But should not one expect that music, resting as it does on instinct, on inner impulses, on feeling, and on imagination, would be better adapted to the female character than the fields of painting and poetry, in which experience, clear concepts, technical skill, etc., are required? Yet it is not necessarily so, because up to now we have seen a Sirani, a Rosalbe, an Angelica Kaufmann, a Lebrun, etc.—but not even a somewhat significant woman composer.

Marianna Martines: A Woman Composer in the Vienna of Mozart and Haydn by Irving Godt, edited by John A Rice, is now available from the University of Rochester Press and all good booksellers.

The Afterlife of a Maverick

John Cunnigham’s study of The Consort Music of William Lawes 1602-1645 has just been published by the Boydell Press. In this post, the author examines how his reputation declined and rose again after his dramatic death fighting for King Charles I at the Siege of Chester in 1645.

The cover of my book is graced with the recently discovered full-length version of the portrait depicting (the person thought to be) William Lawes. Although we may have expected the sitter to have been holding a viol or theorbo etc., the cane he actually holds gives us the impression someone who thought of himself as a gentleman, and who wished to be portrayed as such. This iconographic separation of Lawes from his music can also be observed in the conception and preservation of his reputation as the maverick Cavalier composer: a reputation that long outlived those familiar with his actual music. Lawes’s battlefield death ensured that his memory was quickly draped with a symbolic cloak of Royalist martyrdom; although his music was no longer fashionable (and rarely performed) by the late seventeenth century, Lawes’s reputation enjoyed a great deal more exposure in the centuries betwixt his and ours.

Lawes’s modern reputation primarily rests on his instrumental music, most of which seems to have been composed after he was appointed to that elite section of the Royal Music, the ‘Lutes, Viols and Voices’. Tracing the popularity of Lawes’s music in contemporary sources gives us a good idea of how well it was disseminated beyond rarefied court circles; judging from manuscript sources, the fantasia-suites and viol consorts were popular, the Royall Consort particularly so. However, in his own day Lawes’s songs and catches were also popular; indeed, the first music by him to be printed was vocal – Choice Psalmes (1648). Published by Henry Lawes in memory of his brother, Choice Psalmes carried some of the earliest seeds of William’s reputation. The volume included eight elegies set to music, most notably by John Jenkins. In the preface, Henry also referred to ‘those Elegies which many of his noble Friends have written in a peculiar [i.e. special] Book’. This volume is lost; however, Robert Herrick, Robert Heath and John Tatham all published elegies. William was clearly well liked and respected among contemporary poets and musicians. Few musicians, however, inspire grief in kings. According to Thomas Fuller’s famous account in A History of the Worthies of England (1662), upon ‘hearing of the death of his deare servant William Lawes, [Charles I] had a particular Mourning for him when dead, whom he loved when living, and commonly called the Father of Musick’.

Lawes’s death was encapsulated in Thomas Jordan’s well-known punning epitaph:

Concord is conquer’d; in this urn there lies
The Master of great Music’s Mysteries;
And in it is a riddle like the cause,
Will. Lawes was slain by those whose Wills were Laws.

Lawes’s music remained popular in the decades that followed his death, thanks in part to John Playford’s re-vitalisation of music publishing in England. Playford – a staunch Royalist – emblazoned Lawes’s name on the title-page of his first music publication, A Musicall Banquet (1651). The Banquet included a section of two-part airs ‘By the Rare and accomplished Master in Musick, Mr. WILLIAM LAWES, Deceased And by severall other Excellent Masters in Musick, now living’. Lawes’s music went on to feature prominently in many of Playford’s printed collections, last appearing in a Playford print in 1673. The last seventeenth-century printed collection to include William’s music was Banister and Low’s New Ayres and Dialogues (1678). In terms of manuscript dissemination, the Royall Consort was easily Lawes’s most popular ‘collection’; dances from it are found in manuscripts copied as late as the 1680s. After this his biography and reputation comes to the fore; over the next three centuries William was primarily remembered as the brother of the more famous Henry (friend to the poets), and for the circumstances of his death. The political symbology of Lawes’s death had lost its immediacy, though his name could still evoke images of martyrdom and tragedy.

The first significant biographical account is by Fuller (1662); it formed the basis for many subsequent accounts, including that of Anthony Wood in his ‘Manuscript Notes’ (?c.1680). However, he also noted: ‘William Lawes … an excellent composer for instrumentall musick – but to indulge the ear – he broke sometimes ye rules of mathematicall composition.… His things before and after ye restoration alwaies culled out’. In addition to attesting to the contemporary popularity of his music, Wood’s comments typify Lawes’s subsequent reputation as a musical maverick, though this was not always presented in a positive light. This is perhaps best reflected in Charles Burney’s account of Lawes (and his contemporaries) in A General History of Music (1776–89). His description of the Royall Consort is (in)famous: ‘always mentioned with reverence by his admirers in the last century [it is] one of the most dry, aukward [sic], and unmeaning compositions I ever remember to have had the trouble of scoring’. Burney also used faint praise to damn Lawes’s anthem ‘The Lord is my light’: ‘the best and most solid composition that I have seen of this author; though it is thin and confused in many places, with little melody, and a harmony in the chorus … which I am equally unable to understand or reconcile to rule or to my own ears’. (The anthem had been in use since the Restoration; its inclusion in William Boyce’s Cathedral Music (1760–73) kept it in the repertoire until well into the nineteenth century.) It is easy to understand Burney’s attitude to Lawes’s music: he couldn’t relate it to the ‘rules of mathematicall composition’ that governed the music of his day. Unfortunately, his remarks did much to silence the music of Lawes and his contemporaries for the next century or so.

One finds biographies of William and Henry Lawes in several histories published in the nineteenth century. Such references generally favour Henry (in length and praise), and demonstrate the influence of Burney’s disparaging assessment of the instrumental music. A revival of Lawes’s music did not begin until the 1890s. Sir Frederick Bridge, who (as Professor of Music at Gresham College) gave several lectures on ‘old English music’ in the 1890s, dedicated two lectures to the Lawes brothers: ‘He said it was the custom of musical historian to speak slightly of these distinguished brothers.… He wished to direct a more wide-spread attention to their skill as musicians and their melodious writings.…’ Significantly, musical illustrations were played at both lectures. ‘The Professor said that though some sounds were unfamiliar to modern ears there was so much real music that it could not fail to be appreciated on being heard. The music was not only melodious, but was worth careful study, and he hoped a taste for it would be revived’ (The Morning Post, 11 November 1891). These were among several lectures given by Bridge in which Lawes’s music was played as an exemplar of ‘old English music’. Nonetheless, it was Henry Lawes who was counted as one of his Twelve Good Musicians, from John Bull to Henry Purcell (1920).

Concerts featuring William’s music were also given at the turn of the twentieth century by Sir Hubert Parry. However, in The Music of the Seventeenth Century (1902) he was clearly disappointed with Lawes’s ‘long and elaborate Fancies’: ‘His reputation might well give rise to a hope that they would be interesting. But they are indeed dry and mechanical to quite an extraordinary degree, and do more credit to the composer’s patient ingenuity than to his common sense’. Parry’s analysis is typical of the apologetic stance adopted by nineteenth and early twentieth century English music historians in reference to native music in the seventeenth century before Purcell. Over a century on, Burney was still casting a long shadow.

Arnold Dolmetsch also played a central role in the modern revival of Lawes’s music, and reputation. He and his students gave many concerts in the 1890s that included Lawes’s vocal and instrumental music (including Bridge’s lectures, 1890-92). Lawes’s music also regularly featured in Haslemere programmes; indeed, a performance of a six-part fantasia and ayre at the 1931 Haslemere Festival prompted Rupert Erlebach’s paper on the composer which appeared in The Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association (1932-33).

It was, however, Murray Lefkowitz’s pioneering monograph (1960) which brought Lawes’s music to the attention of the post-war Anglo-American musicological community. Lefkowitz, a former GI, first came across it while stationed in England during WWII. He was the first musicologist to investigate Lawes’s life and music in detail; fifty years on, little has been added to his biographical account. He included a catalogue of Lawes’s works and autograph sources (then-known). His sensitive and enthusiastic discussions of the music exerted a profound influence on subsequent researchers. Lefkowitz also noted the absence of editions of Lawes’s music, an essential aspect of modern performance: his volume of Select Consort Music in the Musica Britannica series (1963, 2/1971) was another landmark in the revival of Lawes’s music.

In the years since studies have been published on many aspects of Lawes’s music, by notable scholars such as Gordon Dodd, Peter Holman and especially David Pinto. Perhaps the crowning glory of Pinto’s Lawes research is his edition of the Royall Consort and accompanying monograph (1995). Pinto was also a participant in the conference held in Oxford in September 1995 to commemorate the 350th anniversary of Lawes’s death; many of the papers given were published in 1998, edited by Andrew Ashbee. My own book is inevitably indebted to the work of previous scholars. In it I have attempted draw attention to the autograph sources (which have never been systemically examined), exploring how Lawes went about composing and what role his music played in the cultural context of Charles I’s court.

Since his death William Lawes was primarily remembered as a talented yet maverick composer, a tragic victim of conflict. In literary and musico-historical accounts, he became one of the symbols of ‘old English Music’. However, writers such as Burney and Parry could not reconcile his reputation as the man whom Charles I ‘commonly called the Father of Musick’ with his tendencies to sometimes break the ‘rules of mathematicall composition’. Today, historical perspective places us in a much greater position than Burney et alia to understand Lawes’s reputation and the music at its heart, and allows us to reconcile the two.

The Consort Music of William Lawes 1602-1645 by John Cunningham is available now from good booksellers.