Music-Making Women-Aristocrats

Abstract

The present article reflects on the shortage of studies concerning music-composing women in the 18th-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and focuses on one unique figure among those female musicians – Maria Antonia Walpurgis, an aristocrat of Polish descent, who demonstrated versatile talents. Thoroughly educated in her childhood, she was a poet, composer, singer, and director of her own stage works. This paper discusses the aristocratic artist’s most important experiences and achievements in the field of music, as well as analysing her earliest surviving work, the cycle of 6 Arias for Soprano, Strings and Basso Continuo (1747), which Walpurgis may well have performed herself. The arias have been preserved in a manuscript kept at the Sächsische Landesbibliothek in Dresden, shelf mark Mus.3119-F-11. My analysis assesses their style and aesthetic.