Giovanni Battista Martini

• 1. Introduction

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  Giovanni Battista Martini was born in Bologna on the 24th of April 1706, and for nearly eight decades he would rarely leave the city. Yet musicians from across Europe made the journey to his door. He was a Franciscan friar who dressed in a habit and kept religious vows. He was also the most sought-after music teacher of his age, the keeper of one of the largest private musical libraries in the world, and the man Leopold Mozart chose when he wanted an expert opinion on his son.

  How does a friar in a Bologna convent become the quiet center of European musical life? What did his library hold, his teaching insist upon, and his scholarship ultimately attempt? And what was it about his methods that drew the young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, as well as Johann Christian Bach, to seek his approval?

• 2. The Making of Padre Martini

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  Antonio Maria Martini, a violinist, gave his son the first musical lessons. That early grounding in the instrument shaped the boy before any formal schooling began. Giovanni then studied singing and harpsichord with Padre Pradieri, and learned counterpoint from Antonio Riccieri and Giacomo Antonio Perti. The priests of the Oratory of Saint Philip Neri handled his classical education.

  On the 11th of September 1722, he took his religious vows and received the Franciscan habit at the Order's friary in Lago. He was still a teenager. Just three years later, at nineteen, he was appointed chapel-master at the Basilica of San Francesco in Bologna. The appointment was early enough to be remarkable. His compositions there attracted enough notice that amateur and professional friends invited him to establish a composition school.

• 3. A School and Its Convictions

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  Martini's teaching had a clear allegiance. He consistently favored the practices of the earlier Roman school of composition. That preference was not merely nostalgic. It expressed a deep conviction about how polyphony should be built, a conviction he would spend decades defending in print.

  The Abbé Vogler dissented. He condemned Martini's philosophical principles as too sympathetic to those of Fux, a position that P. Vallotti had already raised. Vogler's reservations were an exception; most contemporary musicians spoke of Martini with admiration. Among those who studied with him were the Belgian André Ernest Modeste Grétry, the Bohemian Josef Mysliveček, the Ukrainian Maksym Berezovsky, Johann Christian Bach, and the young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. His fellow Conventual Franciscan friar Stanislao Mattei studied with him as well, and later succeeded him as conductor of the girls choir. In 1758, Martini was invited to teach at the Accademia Filarmonica di Bologna.

• 4. The Library

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  Charles Burney, the English music historian, estimated Martini's library at 17,000 volumes. The figure gives a sense of the scale of the collection. Martini was described as a zealous collector of musical literature, and that word zealous does real work here.

  After Martini's death on the 3rd of August 1784, the collection was divided. A portion passed to the Imperial library at Vienna. The remainder stayed in Bologna and is now held in the Museo Internazionale della Musica, formerly the Civico Museo Bibliografico Musicale. The manuscripts of two oratorios remain in Bologna as well, along with three intermezzos, including L'impresario delle Isole Canarie. A requiem and other pieces of church music went to Vienna alongside that portion of the library.

• 5. The Scholar's Ambition

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  Martini's Storia della musica appeared in installments from Bologna between 1757 and 1781. Three volumes were published, but they covered only ancient music. They represented, as the sources make clear, a mere fragment of what Martini had planned. The project was defined by immense reading and industry.

  Critics noted that the style was dry and unattractive, and that the volumes were overloaded with material that could not strictly be called historical. Each chapter opened and closed with puzzle-canons, where only the primary part was written out and the reader had to deduce the canon governing the response. Some of these canons were exceedingly difficult. All of them were eventually solved by Luigi Cherubini. His other major scholarly work, the Esemplare di contrappunto, appeared in 1774 and 1775. It was a learned study drawing on examples from the best Italian and Spanish masters of earlier centuries, with explanatory notes. It treated the tonalities of plainchant and the counterpoints built upon them.

• 6. Canons, Curiosities, and Mozart

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  Leopold Mozart consulted Martini about the talents of his son, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The younger Mozart afterwards wrote to the friar in very effusive terms following a visit to Bologna. That letter is a data point in something larger. Martini was a figure whose opinion carried weight across national and stylistic lines.

  Beyond the great historical projects, Martini showed another side. His celebrated canons were published in London around 1800, edited by Pio Cianchettini. He also left an unpublished set of 303 canons. The sheer number points to a musician who found something close to pleasure in the form, what his biographers describe as a strong sense of musical humour. He also drew up a Dictionary of Ancient Musical Terms, which appeared in the second volume of GB Doni's Works, and published a treatise on the theory of numbers as applied to music. Among his published compositions were the Litaniae atque antiphonae finales B. V. Mariae, issued in Bologna in 1734, twelve Sonate d'intavolatura published the same year, six Sonate per l'organo ed il cembalo in 1747, and Duetti da camera in 1763.