An 18th-Century Phenom Arrives at Lincoln Center

The composer Marianna Martines grew up in Vienna when the city was teeming with towering figures in classical music. Haydn was her neighbor and teacher. Mozart sought her out as a duet partner.

Born in 1744, Martines began her remarkable career at just 16. At 38, she became the first female composer programmed by the Society of Musicians, whose elite concert series also gave Beethoven his Viennese performance debut. But after her death, in 1812, Martines’s music mostly fell silent, a fate shared by so many female composers of her era.

This week, though, the Summer for the City festival at Lincoln Center will perform Martines’s Symphony in C major (1770), a work composed decades before it was common for women to write orchestral music. The performances are a significant step in the reclamation of her music.

“It was an easy decision to present this fantastic piece,” said Jonathon Heyward, the music director of the Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center. “The whole piece is filled with wonderful interplay within the strings and the wind parts.” The first movement, he added, “is light and spirited.”

The pianist Sandra Mogensen found similar qualities in Martines’s piano music, calling it “sparkly, wonderful and vibrant.” She and her colleague Erica Sipes have played through all of Martines’s available keyboard works as part of Piano Music She Wrote, an online project they founded in 2020 to encourage performances of public domain piano music by women. Martines’s Piano Sonata in A major (1765) was one of the first pieces Sipes recorded. “It pulled me in,” she said. “Every movement has something different to say.”

This past spring, Elizabeth Schauer, director of choral activities at the University of Arizona, led what was likely the first performance since Martines’s death of her Mass No. 3 (1761). When she wrote it, “she was only 17,” Schauer said. “My students and I found it astonishing and beautiful.” Schauer used a new score reconstructed by her student James Higgs from manuscripts. For Higgs, Martines’s style reflects her teachers and supporters in Vienna, who were Italian.

“Martines’s music is influenced by Neapolitan composers of opera and sacred music,” he wrote in an email. “From a young age, she was mentored by Pietro Metastasio” — the poet laureate of the Imperial court — “and taught composition by Giuseppe Bonno,” the court conductor for Emperor Joseph II.

Metastasio, who lived with the Martines family, identified Marianna’s talent, and connected her to important figures in Vienna and beyond. When the British historian Charles Burney visited Metastasio in 1772, he attended a salon concert at Martines’s home. Burney wrote that her singing “surpassed all that I had been made to expect,” complimented her vocal compositions as “well written, in a modern style” and praised her as “a most excellent contrapuntist.”

“Martines’s main venue for performance was her home,” Rebecca Cypess, a Yeshiva University musicologist, said. “There were risks for women who put themselves out there in a very public way. Martines crafted her career very carefully to adhere to conventions of elite women’s behavior.”

Her Symphony in C (Martines’s only symphony) most likely premiered at a salon concert, which “could easily have included a small orchestra,” Cypess said.

David Geffen Hall will be a significant change of scenery for Martines’s music.

The concerts emerge from decades of work. Nan Washburn, music director of the Michigan Philharmonic, performed the symphony in the 1980s and created the score and parts that Heyward will use. “I focused on how to make it easier for other conductors to perform it,” she said.

Washburn’s edition is published by Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy, a nonprofit that began in 1981 as the Bay Area Women’s Philharmonic. For the past 20 years, the organization has focused on publishing sheet music and analyzing programming trends.

“We survey the top 21 American orchestras,” Liane Curtis, the organization’s president, said. “This year the performance of women composers is pretty bad, and it is not going up. We see a lot of historical men, and a few living men, then a few living women, and very, very few historical women.”

The Lincoln Center concerts aren’t the first high-profile American presentation of Martines’s symphony: The Handel and Haydn Society in Boston programmed it last year. Could the classical world be headed for a Martines moment?

Her music has been discovered before, but the attention didn’t last. Around the late 19th- and early 20th centuries, “there was a lot of interest in women composers,” said Marian Wilson Kimber, a University of Iowa musicologist. “Martines appears in a couple books listing women composers, including one from 1903 by Arthur Elson, who calls her a ‘figure of musical importance.’”

“My favorite historical question,” Wilson Kimber added, is “How do we forget?”

The history of Martines’s music underscores how factors like a lack of access to publishing or conductors’ predilections can push even highly accomplished composers into the margins.

For Heyward at Lincoln Center, programming it aligns with the mission. “It is a huge part of our responsibility,” he said, “as it is for any orchestra, to be able to expand the canon.”