This was not something easily achieved back in London.58
MARIA ANTONIA WALPURGIS
Many of the terms with which Burney praised Walpurgis, whom he encountered in Munich, are by now familiar. He found in her an amalgam of the living muses of Samuel’s imagination: “A poetess, a paintress, and so able a musician, that she plays, sings, and composes, in a manner Dilettanti seldom arrive at.” As the librettist and composer of the opere serie Il trionfo della fedeltà (ca. 1754) and Talestri regina delle amazzoni (ca. 1763), works shaped by the examples (and even the assistance) of Metastasio and Hasse, Walpurgis was a figurehead for Burney’s ideal of the indivisibility of poetry and music. Burney’s tone in his Germany book is again didactic and theoretical: Walpurgis’s complete authorship of opera “is bringing about a reconciliation between music and poetry, which have so long been at variance, and separated.” Reminding his readers that “among the ancients, the poet and musician were constantly united in the same person,” Burney made the unlikely comparison between Walpurgis and “M. Rousseau, who was not only the author of the poetry, but of the music of his little drama, the Devin du village” (Germany, 1:125–26).
Signs of a patriotic element in Burney’s encounter with Walpurgis and her milieu are immediately apparent with his arrival in Munich. An expatriate atmosphere is suggested, as Burney is reacquainted with “Signor Guadagni and Signora Mingotti . . . performers of such high rank . . . by whose great abilities, in their profession, I have been so frequently delighted in England” (Germany, 1:123). Indeed, Mingotti professed that she would have lived out her days in England were it not possible to “live much cheaper here” (Germany, 1:126). A few days later Burney was introduced to Walpurgis at her summer residence in Nymphenburg, three miles from Munich, during rehearsals for her opera Talestri. The conversation flowed easily, as Walpurgis was fluent in English (“she both read and wrote English constantly everyday, and had great pleasure in the perusal of our authors”) and Burney was familiar with Talestri, which he had “seen . . . in England” and praised as “a great work, both in poetry and music” (Germany, 1:134).
These intimate Anglophone exchanges were the prelude to formal hand kissing that evening and something like an operatic recognition scene. Burney arrived in the grande sale while the court was still at dinner, but he did not have to wait to be greeted by the elector, who promptly rose from the table. Meanwhile “his sister of Saxony treated me as one descended from the Saxon Race” (Germany, 1:136). Whether this notion of a shared ethnicity came from Walpurgis or from Burney is unclear, but it appears to refer to the then commonly held belief that the English (and by extension Englishness) was Teutonic in character and specifically “Saxon” in origin. The term Saxon encompassed miscellaneous German, north European, and Danish territories but excluded the Celts, who were understood to be the original, indigenous inhabitants of Britain. This myth of national ethnicity coincided with, and has been read as an apology for, the Hanoverian dynasty, beginning with George I, which was (in a sense) a foreign rule; it also sat well with recent British history, particularly the revolution of 1688 when the British Parliament imposed the rule of William of Orange, a German Protestant, in preference to that of James II, a Catholic sympathizer. In this context, could Handel’s nickname while in England of “Il Sassone” have helped to connect this German-born composer to national culture? Certainly Handel helped Burney to link Walpurgis to midcentury London. For that evening, Burney continues, the Dowager Electress of Saxony “sung a whole scene in her own opera of Talestri. . . . The recitative was as well written as it was well expressed; the air was an Andante, rich in harmony, somewhat in the way of Handel’s best opera songs in that time [that is, of Andante tempo].”59 Burney’s gentle qualification—Walpurgis’s arias resembled Handel’s best airs—hints at ambivalence about Handel’s melodies and reminds us of Burney’s preference, in the 1770s at least, for another Saxon, Hasse (with whom Walpurgis studied and later collaborated).60 Conversation with Hasse and his spouse, the soprano Faustina Bordoni (then in her seventies), discovered in Handel’s music traces of unreformed male manners: his accompaniments asserted too much learning, and his melodies sometimes lacked refinement.61
In Walpurgis, Burney encountered a living muse already fully established in that exalted guise through her reception and self-fashioning. Her reception ranged as far as Germany and Italy and involved the celebration of numerous aspects of modernity: innovations in music printing; patriotic celebration of female achievement; neoclassical aesthetics, and arguments in favor of despotism. What better work than Walpurgis’s Il trionfo della Fedeltà to announce a new, more commercially viable method of music printing? With the edition of her opera published in 1756 by G.I. Breitkopf (“inventore di questa nuova maniera di stampar la Musica”) Walpurgis stimulated and authorized an explosion in composing and publishing music in German-speaking territory.62 Her mythologization had begun a decade earlier, on the occasion of her marriage in Leipzig (on 10 October 1747) to the elector of Bavaria, Friedrich Christian. In his eulogy, subsequently printed by Breitkopf, Johann Christoph Gottsched, the self-appointed reformer of German language and letters, likened Walpurgis to Minerva and reminded his audience that the ancients chose (female) muses to inspire the arts, just as they chose a goddess, not a god, to oversee the realms of “Wissenschaft und Weisheit” (knowledge and science).63 Gottsched prefaced a flattering note to the first edition of Walpurgis’s Talestri.64 Later he translated the libretti of both of Walpurgis’s operas into German as a homage to their author and, presumably, as models for native poets.65
Gottsched’s celebration of Walpurgis was just as stylized and programmatic as his earlier support of Bach’s Leipzig librettist Marianne von Ziegler had been. Both women were to serve as signs that German letters could achieve the kinds of modern refinement associated with the “femmes forte,” or “précieuse,” of the Parisian salons of the late seventeenth century. As Goodman has discussed, Gottsched’s initial promotion of and collaboration with von Ziegler (whose salon took place in a controversially grand, French-style residence in Leipzig) projected her as a literary Amazon who usurps male privilege and reforms male manners in literary print culture. However, the French-inspired model of the literary Amazon proved untenable in Leipzig, and by 1734, Goodman reported, Gottsched “was tiring of this role.”66 After his marriage to Louise Kulmus he switched to a different model of female literary activity, informed by the structure of guilds and preserving the traditional hierarchy of husband and wife. Kulmus endorsed this model, working as her husband’s “Gehülfin” (apprentice) and critical of von Ziegler’s strategy. At this point the story breaks off, and Goodman leaves us with the impression that the guild-like and native model of the female apprentice achieved permanent hegemony. But Gottsched’s promotion of Walpurgis reveals that something of the Amazonian model continued, at least in relation to a sovereign, whom Gottsched figured as an autonomous leader in German letters.
Walpurgis also cultivated this identity, most obviously in her opera Talestri on the theme of the Amazon queen. Here Walpurgis deployed the often decorative notion of sovereign femininity to precise political ends. Within a plot that offers (conventionally for the genre) an argument for reformed or enlightened despotism, Walpurgis employed the figure of woman (in the guise of the Amazon queen Talestri) as a reforming, moralizing force.67 A brief digression into the plot shows how this is worked out. The three-act opera seria opens on the day of Talestri’s coronation as queen of the Amazons, a bellicose, man-hating tribe at war with the neighboring Scythians. As part of her investiture Talestri must join her people in swearing hatred of all men, but, secretly, she is in love with Oronte, a Scythian prince. Oronte, returning Talestri’s love, is captured, and the high priestess Tomiri orders him to be sacrificed as part of the coronation celebrations. In a politically eloquent twist to the plot Talestri asserts her absolute power—only she can decide if Oronte is to die, thus elevating the throne over the church (act 2, sc. 5). Nonetheless, the message and Oronte’s fate are softened when it is revealed that Oronte was born to an Amazon mother (in fact, to the high priestess). The love of Talestri and Oronte inaugurates a reconciliation of the Amazons and Scythians and an era of peace. Without amounting to an entirely unambiguous celebration
