1706–1784 · Baroque
Giovanni Battista Martini, known as Padre Martini, was born in Bologna in 1706 and died there in 1784. He was a composer, music historian and teacher, and a Franciscan priest. His pupils included Mozart and Johann Christian Bach. The site has his Gavotte for violin and piano.
Giovanni Battista Martini was born in Bologna on 24 April 1706. His father, Antonio Maria Martini, was a violinist and became his son's first teacher.
Padre Pradieri taught the boy to play the harpsichord and to sing, and Antonio Riccieri taught him counterpoint. He also studied with Giacomo Antonio Perti, chapel master of the Cathedral of St Peter. His general schooling came from priests of Saint Philip Neri's Oratory.
As a young man Martini entered a Franciscan friary, where he studied philosophy, mathematics and music theory. In 1725, at nineteen, he was put in charge of the chapel at the church of St Francis in Bologna, and the young chapel master's pieces were noticed.
In 1729 he was ordained a priest. A broadly educated musician and scholar, he remained for several decades at the centre of Italy's musical and public life.
At the invitation of his friends, both amateur and professional, Martini founded a composition school, where a number of well-known musicians were educated. As a teacher he consistently preferred the practices of the earlier Roman school.
Padre Martini is regarded as the foremost teacher of his time. He was a member of the Philharmonic Academy of Bologna and from 1758 took part in its work. He also belonged to the Arcadian Academy.
His pupils included Johann Christian Bach, Florian Leopold Gassmann, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Niccolò Jommelli, André Grétry, Maksym Berezovsky and Stanislao Mattei. Mattei, also a Franciscan friar, later took over the girls' choir from him.
Martini put together a unique collection of books and manuscripts. He collected writings on music with great zeal, and Burney put the size of his library at 17,000 volumes.
After Martini's death part of the collection passed to the Imperial library in Vienna, while the rest stayed in Bologna and is now kept in the Bologna museum of music.
Most musicians of the time spoke of Martini with admiration. Leopold Mozart consulted him about the talents of his son Wolfgang Amadeus, and after a visit to Bologna Wolfgang wrote to the friar in very warm terms.
The Abbé Vogler praised him with reservations, condemning his philosophical principles as too close to those of Fux.
Padre Martini died in Bologna in 1784. He is buried at the former convent of San Francesco.
The conservatoire founded in 1804 and the city library in Bologna are named after him.
As a composer Padre Martini kept to the Roman school of church music. His output includes masses, oratorios, pieces for organ and harpsichord, vocal duets and choruses with instruments. Most of his mainly sacred compositions remain unprinted.
Among the published works, six sonatas for organ and harpsichord appeared in Bologna in 1747 and chamber duets in 1763. The Liceo of Bologna holds the manuscripts of two oratorios and three intermezzos, including L'impresario delle Isole Canarie.
Martini's weightiest books are theoretical. One is the Storia della musica: its three volumes came out in 1757–1781 and deal with the distant past and antiquity, while a fourth, on the early medieval period, was never completed. Each chapter is opened and closed by riddle canons in which just the main voice is notated.
His other chief work is the Esemplare di contrappunto, whose two volumes appeared in 1774–1775. The book gathers illustrations by leading composers of the older Italian and Spanish traditions and comments on them. Martini also compiled a dictionary of old musical terms and issued a treatise on numbers and their use in music.
The site has his Gavotte for violin and piano, at the level Intermediate+.