The Second World War shattered Martinelli’s trajectory. As a woman with documented anti-fascist sympathies and a Jewish maternal grandmother, she fled Italy in 1942, eventually settling in a small coastal town in Bahia, Brazil. It is here that her work took its most poignant turn. Abandoning electricity, she returned to the raw wood of the theorbo, composing a series of pieces for solo strings titled Mágoas do Atlântico (Sorrows of the Atlantic). These works, never performed in her lifetime, are extraordinary for their use of scordatura (alternate tunings) that mimic the rhythms of waves and the interval of the tritone to represent the dissonance of exile. Where her European work was aggressive and futuristic, her Brazilian period was melancholic and deeply introspective.
The centerpiece of Martinelli’s oeuvre, and the primary reason for her historical obscurity, was her radical modification of the theorbo. Once a stately continuo instrument of the Baroque, Martinelli’s “Teorbo Elettroacustico” (1938) replaced six of its gut strings with steel wires of varying tensions, attached to small electromagnetic pickups scavenged from damaged radios. The resulting work, Metamorfosi di un’Arianna (1940), was a thirty-minute lament that shifted between crystalline Baroque pastiche and grinding, industrial feedback. Contemporary reports from a private salon in Milan describe the effect as "disturbing" and "cannibalistic"—as if Monteverdi’s ghost had been forced to possess a factory press. zelica martinelli
Only three authenticated works by Martinelli remain. Two are incomplete sketches for theorbo and voice held at the University of São Paulo; the third is a fourteen-minute, low-fidelity recording of Mágoas no. 2 (1956), rediscovered in a thrift store in Salvador in 2015. The recording is haunting. It lacks the polish of Varèse or the intellectual coldness of Pierre Boulez. Instead, one hears a dialogue between the Baroque and the brutal—a woman forcing an antique instrument to scream its own history. The Second World War shattered Martinelli’s trajectory