A pioneering performance by St Machar’s Cathedral Choir with members of Con Anima.

On Sunday 25 November 2007, Music at Six took a new direction with the first modern performance in Europe, if not the world, of a work unheard since the 18th century – a setting of Psalm 51, the Miserere, by Marianna Martines (1744 – 1812), a Viennese lady composer of aristocratic birth whose music was well known in her day but thereafter became almost entirely neglected.  Her father, an Italian ex-soldier of Spanish extraction, was an officer to the Papal Nuncio in Vienna and a close friend of the poet Pietro Metastasio who, as Imperial Poet Laureate in Vienna, shared the family home and took personal responsibility for Marianna’s education.  Showing musical and intellectual gifts at an early age, she studied musical theory with the young Joseph Haydn and singing with the renowned Nicolo Porpora.  Among her compositional models she cited some of the most respected composers of the mid-century.  Much admired as a singer and keyboard virtuoso, it is said that she was also much favoured by Mozart with whom she played piano duets.  She also possessed considerable talent as a linguist, though all of her known extant works are in Italian or Latin.  

 

She never held any professional position in music or, as far as is known, left Vienna, but probably through the agency of Metastasio her fame spread far beyond her native city – she was the first woman composer to be elected to the august Filarmonica in Bologna, and her compositions are to be found in manuscript form in many centres from North Germany to the present Czech Republic and South Italy.  Her compositional style is mainly conservative, on the mid-century Italian model, and became eclipsed by the brilliant innovations of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, an obscurity compounded by ill-informed comment after her death.  Some 60 works survive, dating from 1760 to 1786, with much of her secular music apparently intended for performance in Imperial Court social circles and her sacred music for her own church, the Michaelerkirche in Vienna.  In her later years she appears to have trained young singers and run a musical ‘salon’ for regular performances.  

 

Written in 1768, the Miserere, like the rest of Marianna Martines’ work, remained unpublished in her lifetime. The edition used for this performance was prepared by Jean Macrae Turner, B.Mus, a former member of St Machar’s Cathedral choir who during the 1990s suspended her career in medicine to study music at Edinburgh University and, learning of this forgotten woman composer, began research.  Funding from the Faculty Of Music of the University Of Edinburgh and the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland enabled travel to the Austrian National Library in Vienna and State Library in Berlin to consult original manuscript sources, and in 1998, after 230 years, this work was finally published by Edinburgh University Faculty of Music.  The performance was conducted by Jean Turner MacRae.