Women and Musical Salons in the Enlightenment.

Through Metastasio, Martines gained access to an important network of professional musicians and aristocrats, but the relationship was hardly one-sided; as Cypess notes, "they each possessed talent and learning that complemented that of the other" (176). As Cypess demonstrates, multiple authorship was far more common in the eighteenth century than has previously been recognized, not least because "the musical salon constituted a space in which the boundaries separating composer, performer, and listener easily blurred or broke down. Cypess posits that Marianna Martines's salon was central to her "deliberate strategies in cultivating a socially sanctioned musical persona" (170); her image, in turn, was critical to her upward social mobility and that of her family, who were not of aristocratic birth. [Extracted from the article]