In addition to his profoundly talented and deeply influential sister, Maria Anna Mozart, there was another Marianna in Mozart’s circle who managed to overcome the typical boundaries set for women as performers and composers in the eighteenth century; a woman known as Marianna Martines.
When eighteen-year-old Joseph Hayden was kicked out of the cathedral choir and his lodgings at the choir master’s home in Vienna due to unappreciated shenanigans and pranks (Hayden was known for his trickster sense of humor), he was taken into the apartments of the Martines family, where the poet and opera librettist Mestastasio also lived. In lieu of paying rent, Hayden gave piano lessons to then seven-year-old Marianna.
The child also took composition lessons with Nicola Porpora, who lived in the same building. When her parents died, she was left in the care of Mestastasio, who had grown fond of Marianna and her siblings. Through him, she had the opportunity to meet other musicians and people of note, including the music historian Charles Burney, whom she performed for by accompanying herself while singing two of her own arias, greatly impressing him.
When Metastasio died, he left most of his estate to the eldest brother, but included an income for Marianna, insuring her financial independence. Because she was independently wealthy and unmarried, she answered only to herself and was able to dedicate her time and resources to music and composition. She composed at least sixty-five significant pieces, including three piano concertos, as well as sonatas, masses, and cantatas.
Marianna hosted a popular weekly musical salon in her home where well-known musicians gathered to perform for each other, including Hayden, Salieri, and Mozart, once he’d moved to Vienna. The two became friends and would perform duets together.
The Irish singer Michael Kelly wrote in his Reminiscences that “Mozart was an almost constant attendant at her parties. She was a great favorite of his.”
A popular name, there were two other Mariannas of musical note in Vienna at that time: Mariana von Genzinger, a pianist for whom Haydn wrote and dedicated his piano sonata in E flat, and Marianna von Auenbrugger, who wrote an impressive keyboard sonata before dying at the young age of twenty-three, and to whom Hayden dedicated six keyboard sonatas along with her older sister.
If visiting the ‘Michaelerhaus’ in Vienna today, where all the renowned musicians gathered regularly at Marianna Martines’s salons, there are two plaques. One commemorates Metastasio, and the other Hayden. There is no mention of Marianna.
