While musical talent in the eighteenth century was judged to be an appropriate feminine accomplishment, Marie Antoinette’s personal relationship with music was unusual. Her love and patronage of the music of the composer Christoph Willibald Glück, whose works she did much to promote in France, reaches back even further than her own birth: indeed, the composer’s official inauguration in the role of composer of “theatrical and chamber music” took place in 1755 at a court ball at the summer palace of Laxenburg, when her mother, Maria Theresia, was roughly three months pregnant with her, the Empress’s fifteenth child. When Archduchess Maria Antonia (“Antoine”) of Austria, the future Marie Antoinette was recorded as singing a French song as early as three-years-old, for the name day of her father, the Holy Roman Emperor Franz I, in 1759. She also met the young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who gave his first concert at Schönbrunn Palace, in 1762, in the presence of the Empress and the Imperial Family, with the boy prodigy from Salzburg performing on the harpsichord. As Austrian Archduchess, Marie Antoinette’s young love of music was expressed in the painting of her at the spinet by Franz Xaver Wagenschön (Kunsthistorisches Museum). The portrait is arresting, showing Marie Antoinette poised to turn the pages of her music, with one hand delicately resting on the keys.  As Archduchess, she sight-read to a professional level (Antonia Fraser, Marie Antoinette: The Journey, Pg 24, 2000) and, taught ballet by the French ballet master, Jean-Georges Noverre, was by all accounts a dancer par excellence. The young Archduchesses were taught music by the court composers Glück and Wagenseil, and also by Joseph Stephen and Johann Adolph Hasse. Two Englishwomen, the Davies sisters, were particularly talented with ‘musical glass’ but also, the harpsichord, and taught the Austrian Archduchesses. Her preferred musical instrument was the harp and she received instruction from her gifted teacher, Philipp Joseph Hinner (Ibid, 2000). 

Marie Antoinette’s library at Versailles included French music, but also the work of the Italian composer, Piccinni (Ibid, Pg 135). An opera by Rameau was given on the occasion of Marie Antoinette’s wedding to the Dauphin Louis Auguste; Candeille’s Castor et Pollux was performed for the then Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette, not long before their departure from the Tuileries in 1791.  In the months leading up to her execution, Marie Antoinette was held in the Conciergerie in Paris. According to the recollections of Rosalie Lamorliere, a servant-girl in the prison between August and October 1793, who became devoted to the deposed French Queen in captivity, and subsequently dictated in old age her first-hand descriptions of Marie Antoinette’s final months, Marie Antoinette’s love of music never left her.  Following the agonizing separation from her children and the execution of Louis XVI, on one occasion in the Conciergerie, she heard the music of a harp being played and looked up instinctively; poignantly, it was the daughter of a glazier, who was repairing the windows of her cell (Ibid, Pg 503).