sweetest human voice.”34 Music, then, could embody (and disembody) the sovereign feminine.
LIVING MUSES
Hume’s female sovereigns illuminate Burney’s ideas of history, music, and gender, but the women of the Tours and General History differ in a crucial regard from the anonymous abstractions of Hume’s essays: they are named individuals with contexts and biographies. Burney’s women exist simultaneously in empirical and allegorical domains, at once material and mythical. Some are distinguished from the men with whom they share the historical stage by a peculiarly intense doubleness. Concrete details about appearance, character, and context take on an abstract, almost generic, quality, as if these portraits sought to project not the individuality of the sitter but something from the realm of the ideal. However, two case studies (of Marianne Martinez and Maria Antonia Walpurgis) will illustrate how those ideals fold back into the historically concrete situation of their author, projecting political affiliations and (related) aesthetic ideals all the more forcefully for their apparent abstraction and constraining idealization. That dynamic is not unique to Burney; indeed, it seems more exemplary than exceptional. It is apparent in two images by Burney’s London contemporary Richard Samuel (recently discussed by Elizabeth Eger), from which I have borrowed the term “living muse.”
Samuel’s engraving titled The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain was printed in a now rare ladies’ pocket book, an illustrated diary, of 1778 (there is no known copy in the United Kingdom). A related but not identical painting, probably produced subsequently, was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1779 with the title Portraits in the Characters of the Muses in the Temple of Apollo (now in the National Portrait Gallery, London; figure 2). A convergence of luxury, patriotism, and female accomplishment is evident in the images, both of which identify and at the same time conceal the actual appearance and context of the sitters (who, moreover, probably did not “sit” specifically for the works). Although even the sitters struggled to recognize themselves in Samuel’s painting, the earlier engraving provides the key, for their names are emblazoned across the bottom of the print (in left to right reversal) for the edification and emulation of readers of the Ladies Pocket Book of 1778: Miss Carter, Mrs. Barbauld, and Mrs. Angelica Kauffman on the right hand; Mrs. Sheridan, in the middle; and Mrs. Lennox, Mrs. Macaulay, Miss More, Mrs. Montague, and Mrs. Griffith on the left hand. This naming aside, a neoclassical composition, emphasizing harmonious coexistence and similarity, appears more important than individuality. The women’s radically different ages, politics, and social positions are smoothed over in favor of a politely gynosocial community.35 Similarly, differences between artistic media are downplayed in an image of peaceful accord and unity that can be read as both a reference to “the sister arts” and, with reference to character (national and personal), as an antonym of the martial and the bellicose so commonly (as in Burney’s Berlin) identified with masculine artistic strivings.36
FIGURE 2. Richard Samuel, Portraits in the Characters of the Muses in the Temple of Apollo (1779). Reproduced with permission of the National Portrait Gallery, London.
The ambiguous 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
