The Tenth Muse: How Maria Antonia Advanced the Pastoral Opera

By April L James

Her Highness' music and life are set within the larger sweep of history, showing us a woman whose music gave voice not only to herself, but to other musicians.

If you could travel back in time, which era would you like to explore?

Take a captivating trip to the opulent courts of 18th-century M

• Language: English
• Publisher: Self Publishing
• Release date: Apr 29, 2024
• ISBN: 9798891090071

April L James

Affectionately known as The PhDiva!!!, Dr. April is a classically trained soprano with a PhD from Harvard best known for her groundbreaking work returning operas composed by women to the world's stages. She survived her Harvard doctoral studies-aka, "boot camp for book lovers"-by getting away from the computer and engaging in playful activities such as dance, juggling and mime, thereby healing from tendonitis, depression and stress-induced weight gain. She is also mad about Lewis Carroll, "Alice in Wonderland", top hats and tea. Her mission is to bring joy to the world through sharing her talents, creativity and knowledge.

Book preview

The Tenth Muse:

How Maria Antonia Advanced the Pastoral Opera

April Lynn James

____________________________________________________________________________

The Tenth Muse: How Maria Antonia Advanced the Pastoral Opera

© Copyright 2023 April Lynn James

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

For more information, email [e-mail].

ISBN: 979-8-89109-006-4 - paperback

ISBN: 979-8-89109-007-1 - ebook

ISBN: 979-8-89109-193-1 - hardcover

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Contents

Letter to the Reader

Introduction

Chapter 1: Court as Theater and Theater at Court

Music-Historical Contexts in Munich and Dresden

Opera Comes to the Munich Court

Maria Antonia’s World

The Music of the Dresden Court

Chapter 2: The Princess’ Musical Influences

Chapter 3: Maria Antonia’s Artistry Gains Recognition

Chapter 4: The Music and Poetry of Maria Antonia’s Youth

Early Dresden Texts: Settings by Hasse and Ristori

Chapter 5: Opera Seria, Intermezzo, or Pastoral?

Maria Antonia’s Library

Sources Consulted

Chapter 6: Her First Opera: Il trionfo della fedeltà

The Poetic and Dramatic Structure of Trionfo

Musical Structure of Trionfo: The Librettist as Composer

Chapter 7: Her Highness’ Voice

The Curious Case of the 1768 Vienna Libretto

Chapter 8: The Princess and the Enlightenment

Why Go Public?: Debates over Authorship

German Reform of the Arts

Chapter 9: The Seven Years’ War and Beyond

The War Years, 1756-1763

The Return to a Private Self, 1763-1780

Her Highness’ Lasting Legacy

Closing Words

Appendix 1: Illustrations

Appendix 2: Primary Sources

Appendix 3:

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Acknowledgements

To all those acknowledged at the front of my dissertation, those thanks still apply. For this book, I would additionally like to thank the following institutions and individuals without whom this work would have remained just another unpublished dissertation:

Karin Graf, Heidrun Lange, and Barbara Andersson of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden for their help in obtaining permission to publish the photo of the portrait of Maria Antonia of Bavaria.

Dr. Steve Turley, through whom I found out about Chandler Bolt and Self-Publishing School.

All the coaches, staff, and Mastermind Community of SPS, and to my editor, Sandra Wissinger.

I also want to thank my family and friends—those who are still among us in the physical as well as those who have shuffled off this mortal coil—for their continued love and encouragement.

Thank you, BG.

And lastly, but certainly not leastly, thanks be to God.

Letter to the Reader

Nearly two decades ago, my elevator pitch sounded something like this: Hi, I’m Dr. April Lynn James and I’m the founder of the Maria Antonia Project, an opera company dedicated to bringing operas composed by women out of the archives and onto the stage. This statement would inevitably be met with the question: Were there any operas composed by women? This book is one of the answers to this question.

When I set out to research women composers, I had no idea that I would wind up writing the first comprehensive English-language biography of Maria Antonia Walpurgis Symphorosa (1724-1780), Electress of Saxony, a multitalented noblewoman who lived in the German states of the Holy Roman Empire in the mid-18th century during a period of constantly shifting political alliances, but I am glad I did. Studying Her Highness helped me to not only improve my understanding of 18th-century music and history, but it also helped me to better understand myself.

A native New Yorker, I had spent my undergraduate years at Queens College of the City University of New York, a public college. Dissuaded from majoring in music by parents who did not consider a music degree to be practical, I earned a BA in communications and an MA in media studies, then worked diligently but unhappily in publishing and television for two years. I consulted many career guides, and my heart, during that time. When I was laid off the day before Thanksgiving 1992, I decided to return to Queens College to study my first love, music. By this time, I had become fascinated by 18th-century music, and along the way, I also became interested in researching female composers due to the distinct lack of works by women in the music history textbooks, concerts, and culture of the time. This was the early 1990s, where people knew about Hildegard von Bingen (12th century) and Clara Schumann (19th century)—that was about it. I found it hard to believe that no woman had created or published music during the intervening centuries, so I started investigating. Since I’m a singer, a soprano, I decided to focus on vocal music and opera, with the hope that, through specializing in this repertory, I could forge a career in a very competitive field.

I wanted to go directly into a PhD program, but it turned out that I had not taken enough music courses as an undergraduate. In order to pursue a PhD in Music, I would need to earn a second BA in the subject. So, that’s what I did, defying parental pressure. Once I started getting straight As as well as scholarships and fellowships, they came around. Then I got into Harvard, and that really sealed the deal.

But studying at the Big H was not at all like studying at QC. At this old private university, status games were de rigueur. As an adult student, I had been on a first-name basis with my professors at QC, but at Harvard, a first-year graduate student was at the bottom of the pecking order. We would not be allowed to address our professors by their first names until after we passed our general exams in our third year. The whole process of graduate school was unnecessarily competitive and stressful, and not just for me. During our orientation week, Residential Advisors and other staff spoke about the suicide rate and the services that were in place to help prevent such things.

Still, I persevered. I like to think that Maria Antonia chose me to write this dissertation on her because the process happened quite organically. I took a class called Manuscript Sources at Harvard. The professor—Christoph Wolff, who would later become my dissertation advisor—had pulled various scores from the library shelves for the class and laid them on a table. As I looked at them, one caught my eye because it was by a woman. It turned out to be the second and third acts from Maria Antonia’s opera, Il trionfo della fedeltà. I asked him, Is anyone working on her? He said, No, to which my immediate response was, I am now.

Thus began a wonderful journey through time and culture that broadened my horizons and called upon many of my favorite skills. It gave me a chance to use the French I’d learned as a child and in high school, the German I had begun studying in college, and the Italian I’d begun studying as part of my second BA. These were the three languages that I would need in order to do my research: the language of 18th-century court society was French, the language of opera and much of Maria Antonia’s poetry was Italian, and the research language of musicology was German.

My doctoral years also set the stage for my current work: helping people recover their joy and sense of purpose so that they can live healthier and happier lives. During my second year of grad school, I developed a repetitive strain injury in my right arm from sitting in the library working on my computer all the time. Due to stress, I gained weight, going up one whole dress size, and was terribly unhappy. I realized that I needed to get out of the music department, away from my computer, and, above all, away from the stressful, hypercompetitive environment.

I got moving. I took modern dance on Radcliffe’s campus and baroque dance at the Longy School of Music, the conservatory just down the street from Harvard. I took mime classes with an independent teacher from Bulgaria. I got back into juggling—a skill I had learned to stave off boredom during my TV days—and joined the Harvard Juggling Club, even though graduate students were not allowed to be official members of an undergraduate club. I continued singing and taking voice lessons, though stress made singing freely nearly impossible. I got back into yoga and took up Alexander Technique and Feldenkrais to better understand my body. Basically, I did anything and everything I could to get myself out of a negative environment and to cultivate positive relationships with people outside of school, with creatives rather than intellectuals.

It paid off. I returned to my normal dress size and the tendinitis went away. Thus, the seeds of my PLAY Elements were sown.

What are the PLAY Elements? you might ask. Why, they are the distillation of everything I have learned about what it takes to navigate the twists and turns of life with one’s sense of humor and health intact (with a good deal of Alice in Wonderland–inspired whimsy thrown in for good measure). P stands for Positivi-Tea & Perseverance—using positive affirmations to help heal mind and body; L is for Love and Laugh—focusing on what you love and enjoying the process; A is for Awe & Authentici-Tea—getting in touch with feelings of wonder by getting out into nature and uncovering one’s authentic desires by connecting to divine guidance using astrology; Y is for staying Young-at-Heart through Youth-Enhancing Movement, maintaining the flexibili-Tea of our analog bodies in a digital environment.

I kept PLAY-ing during my fourth year of grad school when I happily embarked upon a research year in Dresden, Germany. Even though I spent most of my time in the Sächsisches Landes- und Universitätsbibliothek or Hauptstaatsarchiv, I made time to continue studying mime at Mimenstudio Dresden. I continued

private voice study, and I took time to travel around Europe, for research and for pleasure. Because my baroque dance studies had improved my understanding of 18th-century culture in a way that simple book learning never could, I strove to see and hear Dresden, Munich, Padua, Prague, and other locations the way Maria Antonia might have. After returning to the US, I spent two years writing the present work and then became the first graduate student to perform as part of a Music Department dissertation presentation. I got my degree in June 2002 and remained in Cambridge for another year, working part time at Harvard’s Loeb Music Library.

I was in the right place at the right time. They had just inherited a collection of opera scores, and a significant portion of these works were by women. I was asked to curate an exhibit using these resources, and thus In Her Own Hand: Operas Composed by Women 1625-1913 was born. It was the first exhibit in an American library on this topic and remained on display for well over a year. Maria Antonia was one of the eighteen composers featured.

I had combined that job with part-time work as a juggler in a touring educational show, but after a year, I was burnt out. Combining two part-time jobs into one was not my idea of a satisfying postdoc life. I returned to NYC, bringing my research with me, and founded the Maria Antonia Project.

I spent the better part of a decade recovering from my graduate school experience. I have come to refer to this time as my Decade of Awfulness because, while life may have unfolded the way it was supposed to, it definitely did not unfold according to my plans. I struggled to get the company off the ground in New York’s hypercompetitive environment while attending to my increasingly health-challenged mother. Although my brother’s return to the family abode in 2012 was problematic, it gave me the impetus I needed to escape from an intractable situation, put the Maria Antonia Project on hiatus, and move to Philadelphia in 2013, where my research on women composers eventually found a more receptive audience at the University of Pennsylvania. In Her Own Hand lives on as a LibGuide accessible through the Penn Libraries website, partly fulfilling a wish I had had since the exhibit’s creation.

So, after all that, why publish this book now? In part, it is because my research on Maria Antonia is still a solid contribution to the fields of music history, women’s history, German cultural studies, opera, and arts and literature, even though it was completed twenty years ago. Publishing it now gives me a chance to correct a few points I had made back in 2002 in light of my improved understanding of operatic performance. I have been further encouraged by the responses to my research of female artists and entrepreneurs I work with who have a genuine hunger for the knowledge contained within these pages. I also want to give hope and inspiration to the alt-academic community, those of us with doctorates seeking to forge satisfying careers and lives outside the academy. Furthermore, making my book available in e-book and print-on-demand form serves my desire to get my research out of the ivory tower.

What you will find here:

Chapter 1: Court as Theater and Theater at Court is a summary of the research that had been conducted on Maria Antonia up through 2002, and an outline of the theoretical background of my book.

Chapter 2: The Princess’ Musical Influences is a look at what Maria Antonia’s music catalogs can tell us about her musical education.

Chapter 3: Maria Antonia’s Artistry Gains Recognition is a biography of the first thirty years of Maria Antonia’s life and contextualizes her music and poetry as part of a court society that valued Italian culture over earlier French models.

Chapter 4: The Music and Poetry of Maria Antonia’s Youth examines some of Her Highness’ earliest poetry: six arias and cantatas texts that were set to music by Johann Adolf Hasse and Giovanni Ristori. These sources are analyzed for the first time, allowing us to gain a more complete understanding of Maria Antonia’s style and compositional choices.

Chapter 5: Opera Seria, Intermezzo, or Pastoral? looks at Maria Antonia’s literary influences and gives the reader a glimpse into the early 18th-century music-theatrical landscape.

Chapter 6: Her First Opera:Il trionfo della fedeltà is an in-depth examination of this work, again using sources hitherto unexamined. I argue, in opposition to previous researchers, that the work is solely that of Maria Antonia. I look at how she inserts herself into the genre of the pastoral opera (with its shepherds and shepherdesses) by playing a heroine who is active. She is not in need of rescue but rather, through mercy, compassion, and steadfastness, rescues the hero.

Chapter 7: Her Highness’ Voice answers the question, What did Maria Antonia sound like? and looks at what happened to her first opera when it reached Vienna.

Chapter 8: The Princess and the Enlightenment examinesMaria Antonia in the publicsphere by drawing upon primary sources such as letters to furnish an understanding of why and how a woman of her station would publish her works. It also examines the connections between Her Highness and Enlightenment writer Luise Gottsched.

Chapter 9: The Seven Years’ War and Beyond fleshes out the biography of Maria Antonia’s last twenty-fouryears.

I conclude the book with three appendices: the first one is a listing of all illustrations that have been provided in the book; the second one is a comprehensive listing of both Maria Antonia’s works and primary sources relating to her; the third one is a listing of composers whose works were a treasured part of Maria Antonia’s library. Again, most of these sources had been unexamined by previous researchers. Additionally, English-language descriptions of the majority had been unavailable to scholars.

May you enjoy getting to know Her Highness, her music, and her world as much as I have.

Introduction

My