Becoming a Virtuosa: Advice from Vienna, 1769

Abstract

First-hand accounts explaining how a young British virtuosa went about establishing an international career in the later eighteenth century are scant. However, a previously unstudied handwritten page contained within the Rackett Family of Spettisbury Archive at the Dorset History Centre provides new insights into this underexplored area. In this article, I examine an anonymous 1769 document entitled ‘a Vienne’ from which the guiding voices of eminent musicians at the Vienna court, including Johann Adolf Hasse, Faustina Bordoni, Marianna Martines and their circle, emerge. I argue that this item is in fact an aide-mémoire memorializing intimate glimpses of private conversations, career-shaping advice and impressions that helped mould its author into a virtuosa. Further, by means of palaeographical and biographical evidence I identify the author as the young British glass-armonica player Marianne Davies and assert that her recollections, preserved in this hitherto overlooked piece of ephemera, reconstruct how the educational process of becoming a virtuosa took place.