Marianna Martines at the keyboard: music, agency, and self-fashioning

Thesis

This thesis explores Marianna Martines as a composer-performer, with a particular focus on her keyboard repertoire. It provides a situational map that places her within the socio-musical context of 18th -century Vienna, culminating in a somatic epistemology for engaging with her keyboard works. Venturing beyond traditional theoretical analysis, this thesis highlights socio- political, performative, and embodied aspects of her music, revealing how she self-fashioned her artistic identity and exercised personal agency, particularly within her salons. Doing so engages with the question of what it means for a pianist to ‘speak’ through their music.

Martines’s impact on Viennese musical life, including her influence on her contemporaries, underscores her lasting significance. Historical biases mistakenly judged women by androcentric standards that often did not apply to their lived realities. This thesis examines how gender and class shaped Martines’s career choices, and particularly the curation of a publicly private persona: her outwardly displayed status as a private person, and non- professional dilettante, while repeatedly finding herself in the public eye.

The thesis contextualises Martines within the broader socio-political context of Enlightenment Vienna, including 18th -century anxieties over marriage and gender roles, frequently commented on by contemporary writers. Among the latter was a semi-anonymous author, known only by her initials T.R.v.N., who published a feminist manifesto that challenged gender inequalities, particularly women’s limited agency in establishing intimate relationships. These documents imply the profound implications Martines’s unmarried status had for her financial security and social freedom, particularly due to her family’s striving for social mobility and their resulting strict adherence to upper-class conventions.

Beyond galant schemata, analysing Martines’s keyboard works for their somatic qualities, this thesis reveals how she balanced sociability with virtuosity. She found greatest possible freedom of expression within rigidly defined norms, subtly subverting expectations and pushing boundaries, while maintaining decorum through her mentor Metastasio’s ideal of sprezzatura.

Authors: Engel, JV

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-x5kex986z
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: Marianna Martines; performance studies; somatic epistemology; Classical music; salon music; women composers; sprezzatura; keyboard music; feminist history; enlightenment Vienna
• Subjects: Feminist History; Performance Studies; Historical Musicology