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 British throne, and through notions of shared Anglo-Saxon ethnicity, a way of rendering Italian opera seria a national, quasi-British repertory. 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