Giovanni Battista Martini
| Columbia Encyclopedia: Giovanni Battista Martini |
Martini, Giovanni Battista (jōvän'nē bät-tēs'tä märtē'nē), 1706-84, Italian composer and teacher, also known as Padre Martini. Martini became a priest in 1722. He acquired great prestige as a teacher, particularly of counterpoint. His students included J. C. Bach, Gluck, Grétry, and Mozart. Martini built up a vast library devoted to the historical, scientific, and mathematical aspects of music.
| Artist: Padre Martini |
- Period: Classical (1750-1819)
- Country: Italy
- Born: April 24, 1706 in Bologna, Italy
- Died: August 03, 1784 in Bologna, Italy
- Genres: Opera
Biography
Grandly and misleadingly called "one of the most famous figures in eighteenth century music" by over-specialized musicologists, Giovanni Battista Martini was an important personality in the narrow confines of Italian music and counterpoint pedagogy. Described as both affable and arrogant, Martini was a supportive and much sought-after teacher; his students included the young Mozart and J.C. Bach.Martini enjoyed substantial early musical training, but at age 15 he decided he wanted to become a monk and was sent to a monastery. This residency lasted about a year; in late 1722 he returned to his native Bologna to become an organist at the church of St. Francesco. In 1725 he became that church's maestro di cappella, a position he would hold until near the end of his long life. He was ordained a priest in 1729.
Padre Martini's first published works appeared in 1734, a collection called Litaniae atque antiphonae finales Beatae Virginis Mariae; after this liturgical beginning, Martini would eventually publish three collections of secular music.
Among his honors were election to the Academy of the Bologna Institute of Science in 1758, the Bologna Philharmonic Academy (in the same year), and the Arcadian Academy in Rome in 1776. He was offered jobs at the Vatican and perhaps in Padua, but Martini preferred his employment in Bologna; indeed, his trips out of town were few and far between.
He was a hard worker and easily likable, inspiring great affection in personalities as different as Mozart and Charles Burney. Yet he was also in many respects an adamant musical reactionary, resisting French innovations in music theory and the progressive tendencies of even his fellow-countryman Tartini (with whom he nonetheless remained on cordial terms). His fees from teaching counterpoint and singing enabled him to amass a huge personal music library (perhaps 17,000 volumes by 1770), as well as a collection of 300 portraits of musicians; eventually, getting one's portrait into Martini's hands was equivalent to a modern Hollywood celebrity having "arrived" by getting a set of footprints onto the Walk of Fame.
Martini wrote extensively on ancient Greek music and plainchant (which he considered to be a particularly expressive form of music), and published a volume of excerpts for the teaching of advanced counterpoint. His own music, however, was largely homophonic, skewed to high voices. A major exception to this tendency was his 1742 Sonate d'intavolatura, which employed a rich counterpoint suggesting a familiarity with Bach. ~ James Reel, All Music Guide
| Wikipedia: Giovanni Battista Martini |
Giovanni Battista Martini (24 April 1706 – 3 August 1784), also known as Padre Martini, was an Italian musician.
Contents |
Biography
Martini was born at Bologna.
His father, Antonio Maria Martini, a violinist, taught him the elements of music and the violin; later he learned singing and harpsichord playing from Padre Pradieri, and counterpoint from Antonio Riccieri and Giacomo Antonio Perti. Having received his education in classics from the fathers of the oratory of San Filippo Neri, he afterwards entered upon a noviciate at the Franciscan monastery at Lago, at the close of which he was received as a Minorite on September 11, 1722.
In 1725, though only nineteen years old, he received the appointment of chapel-master in the Franciscan church at Bologna, where his compositions attracted attention. At the invitation of amateurs and professional friends he opened a school of composition at which several celebrated musicians were trained; as a teacher he consistently declared his preference for the traditions of the old Roman school of composition. Padre Martini was a zealous collector of musical literature, and possessed an extensive musical library. Burney estimated it at 17,000 volumes; after Martini's death a portion of it passed to the Imperial library at Vienna, the rest remaining in Bologna, now in the Museo Internazionale della Musica (ex Civico Museo Bibliografico Musicale).
Most contemporary musicians speak of Martini with admiration, and Leopold Mozart consulted him with regard to the talents of his son, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Abt Vogler, however, makes reservations in his praise, condemning his philosophical principles as too much in sympathy with those of Fux, which had already been expressed by P. Vallotti. His Elogio was published by Pietro della Valle at Bologna in the same year.
In 1758 he was invited to teach at the Accademia Filarmonica di Bologna.
Among Martini's pupils: the Belgian André Ernest Modeste Grétry, the Bohemian Josef Mysliveček, the Ukrainian/Russian Maksym Berezovsky, the young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Johann Christian Bach and the famous Italian cellist Giovanni Battista Cirri.
The greater number of Martini's sacred compositions remain unprinted. The Liceo of Bologna possesses the manuscripts of two oratorios; and a requiem, with some other pieces of church music, are now in Vienna. Litaniae atque antiphonae finales B. V. Mariae were published at Bologna in 1734, as also twelve Sonate d'intavolalura; six Sonate per l'organo ed il cembalo in 1747; and Duetti da camera in 1763. Martini's most important works are his Storia della musica (Bologna, 1757-1781) and his Esemplare di contrappunto (Bologna, 1774-1775). The former, of which the three published volumes relate wholly to ancient music, and thus represent a mere fragment of the author's vast plan, exhibits immense reading and industry, but is written in a dry and unattractive style, and is overloaded with matter which cannot be regarded as historical. At the beginning and end of each chapter occur puzzle-canons, wherein the primary part or parts alone are given, and the reader has to discover the canon that fixes the period and the interval at which the response is to enter. Some of these are exceedingly difficult, but Luigi Cherubini solved the whole of them.
The Esemplare is a learned and valuable work, containing an important collection of examples from the best masters of the old Italian and Spanish schools, with excellent explanatory notes. It treats chiefly of the tonalities of the plain chant, and of counterpoints constructed upon them. Besides being the author of several controversial works, Martini drew up a Dictionary of Ancient Musical Terms, which appeared in the second volume of GB Doni's Works; he also published a treatise on The Theory of Numbers as Applied to Music. His celebrated canons, published in London, about 1800, edited by Pio Cianchettini, show him to have had a strong sense of musical humour.
Professor Peter Shickele, in his satirical "study" of the life of the fictitious P.D.Q. Bach has "found" that P.D.Q. Bach's second phase of life, the soused period, was shaped in part by Padre Martini (and further by his association with Thomas Collins).
External links
- Free scores by Giovanni Battista Martini in the Werner Icking Music Archive (WIMA)
- More information, including full text, of Martini's Storia della musica in the University of North Texas Music Library's Virtual Rare Book Room
- Free scores by Giovanni Battista Martini in the International Music Score Library Project
- Free scores by Giovanni Battista Martini in the Choral Public Domain Library (ChoralWiki)
References
- This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
Sources
- Sadie, S. (ed.) (1980) The New Grove Dictionary of Music & Musicians, [vol. # 11].
- Elisabetta Pasquini, Gimbattista Martini. Palermo, L'Epos, 2007. ISBN 978-88-8302-343-9
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Mentioned in
- La Dirindina, intermezzo (Classical Work)
- Martini: Requiem e Missa Solemnis (Classical Album)
- The Medici Harpsichord Book (Classical Album)
- Philharmonic Academy of Bologna
