Giovanni Gabrieli

Italian composer

• Born: c. 1556
• Birthplace: Venice, Republic of Venice (now in Italy)
• Died: August 12, 1612
• Place of death: Venice, Republic of Venice (now in Italy)

A gifted Venetian school composer during the Renaissance and Baroque eras, Gabrieli was critical to the development of German music during the Baroque period. Also, Gabrieli was one of the first composers to specify whether music should be played loudly or softly.

Early Life

Very little is known of the early life of Giovanni Gabrieli (jyoh-VAHN-nee gah-bree-EHL-ee), as is typical for composers of the Italian Renaissance. Unlike the greatest artists, musicians were usually regarded as servants, not celebrities. Even the exact year of his birth is unknown, since the notice of his death in the records of his parish church lists his age at death as fifty-six, while the Venetian public health records give it as fifty-eight. His parents were Pietro de Fais, a weaver, and Paola, the sister of Andrea Gabrieli, a noted composer. Sadly, many documents relating to Giovanni Gabrieli’s life may have been destroyed by Napoleon I’s armies in 1797, and others at the end of World War II in 1945.

Giovanni’s first teacher was his uncle, with whom he went to Munich, probably in 1575, as a musician at the court of the duke of Bavaria, Albert V. In Munich, Giovanni was associated with a number of other noted composers besides his uncle, notably Orlando di Lasso . Two other gifted composers he came to know in his formative years became lifelong friends, Giuseppe Guami, another musician at the Bavarian court, and Hans Leo Hassler, a student of Andrea. Giovanni’s adoption of his uncle’s surname and his painstaking editing of his uncle’s works after Andrea’s death indicate his closeness to his relative and teacher. Giovanni’s own pupil Heinrich Schütz was to be another close friend.

It is clear that Gabrieli made friends easily and that many of his friends throughout his life were other musicians, including several Germans. It is quite possible that at least some of Gabrieli’s recognized influence on the development of German early Baroque music came about through his friendships as well as his gifts. That would not be unique in musical history. Some of the influence of the Netherlands school may have been as a result of the attractive personalities of its members, particularly Johannes Ockeghem and Lasso. During the classical period, Franz Joseph Haydn’s good nature may have contributed to his success. Unfortunately, much more is known about the lives and personalities of Ockeghem, Lasso, and Haydn than is known about the life and personality of Gabrieli.

Life’s Work

Gabrieli was already a respected composer when he returned to Venice, sometime between 1579 and 1584. In 1584, he was hired as a temporary organist at St. Mark’s Basilica, and he won the permanent post of second organist the following year. He was to hold it for life. St. Mark’s had two organs in lofts at the north and south ends of the building, so there were always two organists. During Gabrieli’s tenure, a third (chamber) organ was added. Normally the organists used only one and played on alternate Sundays, but on great feast days all three organs would be used. There was no difference in salary and responsibilities between the first and second organists. When Giovanni was hired, his uncle was the first organist. From 1588 to 1591, the first organist was Giovanni’s friend Guami, while for the remainder of Giovanni’s life, the other organist was Paolo Giusto. In 1585, Giovanni became organist for a lay religious society, the Scuola Grande di San Rocco. Both posts required the organist to compose as well as to play, which was a general requirement for salaried organists and music directors (Kappelmeisters) until about the beginning of the nineteenth century.

At St. Mark’s, Gabrieli had the use of one of the largest and best-trained musical establishments in Europe, partly built by his uncle during the twenty years (1566-1586) Andrea was an organist at the basilica. The paid permanent ensemble included thirty or more singers and four instrumentalists (two cornets and two trombones). Moreover, Gabrieli could draw on far larger resources on special occasions, such as great feasts of the Church and public festivals. Since many of his instrumental pieces called for strings, woodwinds, and additional brasses, it is clear that Gabrieli regularly hired additional musicians. These could have come from many sources and may have included women as well as men.

Venetian ospedales (foundling homes and orphanages) included such excellent music instruction that, a century later, Antonio Vivaldi’s girls at the Pietà are thought to have been the best ensemble in Europe, providing the orchestra for all his works and the soloists for all his concertos, except those for violin. Other resources that could be drawn on included church choirs, the professional trumpeters who accompanied the doge, and the musicians of the several religious confraternities, among them Gabrieli’s own Scuola Grande di San Rocco. Very few other cities had such numerous, varied, and talented bodies of musicians available, and Venetian composers from Adrian Willaert to Vivaldi made full use of them. It was this unmatched abundance of players and singers that helped attract talented composers to Venice and that helped to make the Venetian school distinct from the musicians of other Italian regions.

Venetian music, like Venetian painting, imparts a feeling of opulence. Some of Gabrieli’s best works drew on all these resources, stretched them further than had earlier Venetian composers, and achieved a kind of massive grandeur that was opulent even by Venetian standards and entirely appropriate to the richness of St. Mark’s.

Associated as he was with St. Mark’s and other religious bodies, a great part of Gabrieli’s output was of sacred music. He wrote madrigals while in Bavaria, but, apparently, very few after he returned to Venice. There is no evidence of his ever having written dance music. Instead, he devoted himself to the composition of religious works, primarily for St. Mark’s, and ceremonial music for both St. Mark’s and the religious processions of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco.

Venetian composers, starting with Willaert, who introduced Venice to the advanced ideas of the Netherlands school to which he belonged, had made use of the large size, multiple organs and choir lofts, and long echoes of St. Mark’s by separating their choirs and placing choirs or sections in different parts of the cathedral (called cori spezzati), often with instrumentalists, chiefly trombones, trumpets, and bassoons. They might play and sing together or antiphonally choirs answering one another. Listeners hear the music as if it came from different directions, and, if all musicians were playing and singing, from all directions. Ideally suited to St. Mark’s, this practice lasted longer in Venice than anywhere else in Italy. Gabrieli was the last major Italian composer to use cori spezzati in his church pieces, and he also introduced the practice into his many canzones, short works for instruments, usually brass and organ. The effects were rich and majestic, even by Venetian standards.

Cori spezzati composition and performance endured much longer in Germany than in Italy, for a variety of reasons. The Germans, on the whole, were more religious than the Italians. Gabrieli’s successors at St. Mark’s, Claudio Monteverdi and Giacomo Carissimi, were the last significant Italian religious composers before Vivaldi. Even Monteverdi’s operas and madrigals are at least as well known as his sacred music. Secular music, not sacred, was what the Italian public wanted. In Germany, on the other hand, the chapel, not the opera house, was where the audience went to hear music. German and Austrian composers continued to write large quantities of church music, Catholic and Protestant, throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Many German cathedrals were as suited to separated choirs as St. Mark’s. Indeed, many composers who worked in Germany, including Andrea Gabrieli and Lasso, composed for cori spezzati.

Another reason for its survival in Germany was that Venetian works were common and appreciated north of the Alps. Many German musicians had studied in Venice because of the excellence of its resources and teaching. Moreover, Venice was then the most important center for music publication. The publication of Gabrieli’s own works, begun during his lifetime with madrigals composed while he was in Bavaria, continued with Sacrae symphoniae (1597) and the posthumous Canzoni e sonate (1615). Many works still remained in manuscript at that time. In 1956, Denis Arnold began publishing Gabrieli’s complete works, but some lost ones have been discovered during the 1980’s.

As little is known of Gabrieli’s later years as is known of his early life. It is probable that he married and had a large family, and it is certain that he spent a good part of his spare time in the German community, where he had many friends. Aside from this, it is known only that he died from kidney stones after a long illness in 1612.

Significance

Gabrieli’s place in history seems secure. Unlike the works of most early Baroque and Renaissance composers, his choral works, in particular, sometimes were performed during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His popularity resulted from one of the earliest important musicological studies, Carl von Winterfeld’s Johannes Gabrieli und sein Zeitalter (1834), which reintroduced his work at a time when practically no Renaissance and early Baroque music was played or sung, except for that of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. While Winterfeld’s work contained a number of exaggerated claims for Gabrieli that later scholars have rejected, the work did influence continuing research on and performance of the Venetian master. Winterfeld was particularly interested in Gabrieli’s choral works, while later studies have concentrated more on his instrumental pieces.

Gabrieli and his younger Roman contemporary, Girolamo Frescobaldi, are usually considered the most important Italian organ composers. In Gabrieli’s case, his fame rests on a number of pieces ranging from ricercars, toccatas, and fugues, all exercises in theme and variation, to intonations, short pieces of a few bars that introduce longer works, usually for choir, organ, and instruments. Gabrieli’s compositions for instrumental ensembles have especially interested modern musicologists and performers, particularly brass players. Musicologists see them as leading directly to the sonata and concerto. While some are for strings and organ and others for strings, organ, and winds, many are for brass or brass and organ. Since the brass repertory is rather limited, Gabrieli is a favorite of most brass ensembles.

The vocal music of Gabrieli and his German admirers, such as Schütz and Michael Praetorius, has frequently been recorded. Massive works requiring multiple choirs, vocal soloists, organs, and brasses placed in different positions in echoing cathedrals are a perfect subject for stereophonic and quadrophonic recording. A few contemporary musical groups and composers have composed and performed cori spezzati.

Bibliography

Arnold, Denis. Giovanni Gabrieli and the Music of the Venetian High Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. This is the fullest and most readable biography of Gabrieli in English. Arnold sees Gabrieli as a brilliant conservative, a late sixteenth century Bach.

Charteris, Richard. Giovanni Gabrieli (ca. 1555-1612): A Thematic Catalogue of His Music with a Guide to the Source Materials and Translations of His Vocal Texts. Stuyvesant, N.Y.: Pendragon Press, 1996. A companion to the author’s twelve-volume edition of Gabrieli’s complete works, this text includes thematic, historiographic, and textual analyses of Gabrieli’s entire corpus. Includes illustrations, discography, bibliographic references, and indexes.

Fenlon, Iain. Music and Culture in Late Renaissance Italy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Much of this study is devoted to the creation and performance of music in Giovanni Gabrieli’s Venice. Includes illustrations, bibliographic references, and index.

Grout, Donald Jay. A History of Western Music. Rev. ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1973. This fine general work places Gabrieli and other composers in perspective.

Kenton, Egon. Life and Works of Giovanni Gabrieli. Rome: American Institute of Musicology, 1967. A highly technical work for the professional musician, musicologist, or music historian. Kenton’s work is of value to the amateur student chiefly as a second opinion to balance that of Arnold.

Robertson, Alec, and Denis Stevens, eds. Renaissance and Baroque. Vol. 2 in A History of Music. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1965. Like that of Grout, this is a general work. Its particular value for the student is in putting Gabrieli and other Renaissance and Baroque composers in perspective in the European musical scenes of their times.

Saunders, Steven. “The Legacy of Giovanni Gabrieli: Priuli’s Missa sine nomine and Valentini’s Missa Diligam te Domine.” In Cross, Sword, and Lyre: Sacred Music at the Imperial Court of Ferdinand II of Habsburg (1619-1637). New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Traces Gabrieli’s influence on seventeenth century sacred music by looking at two of his Northern successors. Includes sheet music, illustrations, bibliographic references, and index.

Selfridge-Field, Eleanor. Venetian Instrumental Music from Gabrieli to Vivaldi. New York: Praeger, 1975. In chapter 4, which is devoted to Gabrieli, Selfridge-Field portrays him as playing a crucial role in the creation of the Baroque era and in anticipating the concerto and the sonata.