To a composer of Marianna's talents who honed her skills, as she tells us in her autobiographical statement, by studying the scores of the greatest operatic composers of the age, and whose arias were likened by one of her contemporaries to Jommelli’s, opera must have beckoned. Yet this was a genre restricted largely to professional composers, which meant, of course, to men. She wrote no operas, but she left in her two surviving oratorios a vivid sense of her skills as a dramatic composer. And she left in her settings of Italian aria texts a hint of what might have resulted if Vienna's operatic stages had been open to her.

Italian Arias

Charles Burney, even before he met Martines, was eager to do so because he hoped that in her vocal compositions and performance he would hear an authentic expression of Metastasio's aesthetic principles:

Burney was not disappointed, writing of Marianna's settings of Metastasio's ariatexts, when he finally heard them: “The airs were very well written, in a modern style; but neither common, nor unnaturally new. The words were well set, the melody was simple, and great room was left for expression and embellishment; but her voice and manner of singing, both delighted and astonished me!”

His judgment of the arias (both as compositions and as opportunities for vocal display and improvisation) applies well to the collection of twenty-four arias preserved in a manuscript entitled Scelta d’arie composte per suo diletto da Marianna Martines. Marianna assembled this collection in 1767, at the age of twentythree, in a pair of elegantly copied volumes now preserved in the library of the Conservatorio San Pietro a Majella in Naples.