the greatest living musician in the world.48 Whether or not Burney believed her to be so is irrelevant; the statement functions to remove all constraints on what is presented as an experiment. For the encounter with Metastasio and Martinez answers a question about which theorists could only speculate—how does the ideal union of poetry and music sound? Burney framed the crucial visit to Kohlmarkt 11 like a chemist writing a paper on the mixture of elements: “I was extremely curious to know what kind of music would best fulfil [sic] the ideas of Metastasio, when applied to his own poetry; and imagined that this young lady, with all the advantages of his instructions, counsel, and approbation, combined with her own genius, must be an alter idem, and that her productions would include every musical embellishment which could be superadded to this poetry, without destroying or diminishing its native beauty.”49
In ordinary circumstances Burney looked to the Metastasio settings of Hasse for worldly models of that perfection, but Martinez offered a glimpse of a higher synthesis of words and music, of ancient and modern idioms, comprising not fully fledged operas, written for particular occasions, tailored to specific personnel, but miscellaneous arias and psalms (translated by Metastasio), conceived and, crucially for Burney, performed in the neutral, aesthetic laboratory of Kohlmarkt 11. Here Burney found in Martinez’s music a neoclassical principle of harmonious reconciliation. After pondering the schism between the operatic factions of Hasse–Metastasio and Gluck–Calsabigi, between the old and the new, Burney found in one of Martinez’s psalm settings (a suitably timeless and spiritually elevated context) the perfect reconciliation of antico e moderno:
Mademoiselle Martinez was at her musical studies, and writing; she directly complied with my request, of sitting down to the harpsichord. Metastasio desired her to shew me some of her best studies; and she produced a psalm for four voices, with instruments. It was a most agreeable Mescolanza, as Metastasio called it, of antico e moderno; a mixture of the harmony, and contrivance of old times, with the melody and taste of the present. It was an admirable composition, and she played and sung it in a very masterly manner, contriving so well to fill up all the parts, that though it was a full piece, nothing seemed wanting. The words of this psalm were Italian, and of Metastasio’s translation.50
Burney praised Martinez as a composer in a range of genres, including sacred counterpoint, but praise turned to veneration when the topic turned to Italian opera. In this context Martinez emerged as a singing monument to the aesthetic ideals of midcentury opera seria with which Burney was preoccupied during his Tours, perhaps because of the prestige and significance of that genre in London, and perhaps because of Burney’s sense that the tradition was dying out. In her Italian arias Martinez displayed the authorial restraint Burney felt that composers owed to the voice, and, here again, she found the middle course between convention and novelty: the arias were “very well written, in a modern style; but neither common, nor unnaturally new. The words were well set, the melody was simple, and great room was left for expression and embellishment.”51 But what really captured Burney’s imagination was her manner of singing, “which no longer subsists elsewhere.” Burney recorded the elements of this vanishing vocal tradition with particular precision:
Her voice and manner of singing, both delighted and astonished me! I can readily subscribe to what Metastasio says, that it is a style of singing which no longer subsists elsewhere, as it requires too much pains and patience for modern professors. . . . I should suppose that Pistocco, Bernacchi, and the old school of singing, in the time of cantatas, sustained, divided the voice by minute intervals, and expressed words in this manner, which is not to be described: common language cannot express uncommon effects. 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 [sic] the significance and energy of these expressions. The Italian augmentatives would, perhaps, gratify my wish, if I were writing in that language; but as this is not the case, let me only add, that in the portamento, and divisions of tones and semitones into infinitely minute parts, and yet always stopping upon the exact fundamental, Signora Martinez was more perfect than any singer I had ever heard: her cadences too, of this kind, were very learned, and truly pathetic and pleasing.52
The precision of Martinez’s intonation called forth Burney’s: he is unusually explicit here about pitch even as he claims language inadequate to praise her sufficiently. Martinez’s voice is exactly organized, dealing in fractions of ever diminishing proportion. Connecting notes seamlessly through portamento, Martinez always comes to rest on the “exact fundamental,” as if (like Dottoressa Laura Bassi) she had mastered an invisible physics, able to divide “tones and semitones into infinitely minute parts.” Prized in its own right, this “perfect intonation” also enabled Martinez to “express words [in a way] which is not to be described.”53 Uniting the domains of expression and virtuosity, the learned and the pathetic, Martinez’s voice testified to the possibility of wholeness, of uniting opposites in a harmonious balance. Not simply exemplary, she demonstrated the possibility of achieving perfection—a living muse.
Burney’s description of Martinez’s voice is ambiguous: he may be evoking a notion of the singer’s quasi-scientific mastery of pitch and ornamentation, or he may be implying that she is (as a correspondent put it) “some kind of automaton, an alter idem of Metastasio, indeed, in a Pygmalionesque relationship [with the poet].”54 Burney’s comments on Martinez’s composition are similarly ambiguous—even ambivalent. In treating them as exemplars of a middle path, a principle of moderation, he at once elevates and neutralizes them. Ultimately it remains unclear if Burney understood Martinez as a narrowly feminine figure or as rising above gendered differences: arguably he describes her as both of these, and thus as both an exemplary woman and androgynous. These uncertainties notwithstanding, it is clear that Martinez’s agency and individuality vanished into a generic neoclassical ideal, one that recalls Samuel’s similarly conventionalized images of the living muses of Great Britain.
Neoclassicism was a well-worn mode of both celebrating and containing female achievement in the arts by the time Burney embarked on his Tours. Already at midcentury, writings on the nature of the beautiful often invoked some notion of androgyny—a gendered middle course—as part of a neoclassical aesthetic of the golden mean.55 In his chapter on Vienna Burney described the golden age of opera seria as an aesthetic coupling, a search for wholeness, with reference to Plato’s notion of the androgyne, the mythical creature, doubly sexed, which, severed from itself, seeks wholeness in its missing half:
This poet and musician are the two halves of what, like Plato’s Androgyne, once constituted a whole; for as they are equally possessed of the same characteristic marks of true genius, taste, and judgment; so propriety, consistency, clearness, and precision, are alike the inseparable companions of both. When the voice was more respected than the servile herd of imitative instruments, and at a time when a different degree, and better judged kind of study rendered it, perhaps, more worthy of attention than at present, the airs of Signor Hasse, particularly those of the pathetic kind, were such as charmed every hearer, and fixed the reputation of the first singers in Europe. [Here Burney inserted an unnumbered footnote:] Such as Farinelli, Faustina, Mingotti, etc.56
Acknowledging the efforts of “Dr. [John] Brown . . . to prove, the separation of music and poetry,” Burney finds in the neoclassical aesthetic of midcentury Italian opera an imaginary unity that overcomes modern fragmentation and peacefully reconciles the sister arts.57 As the companion of Metastasio, Martinez was well placed to represent this aesthetic, but because she was not herself a poet, her mythologization could proceed only so far. Martinez’s Catholicism may also have limited her potential significance for Burney, who passed over her liturgical music, preferring to treat even her psalm settings abstractly as studies in style. In the Protestant Maria Antonia Walpurgis, Dowager Electress of Saxony, Burney discovered not only another monument to midcentury opera seria but, through her connection to the
