Giovanni Gabrieli
Authors: Bryant David 
Published: May 2017

Giovanni Gabrieli (b. c. 1554/7–d. 1612) is generally regarded as the supreme representative of large-scale Venetian ceremonial music for voices and/or instruments during the late 16th and early 17th centuries, and was also one of the most celebrated keyboard players of his day, occupying the role of organist at the Venetian ducal chapel from 1585 until his death. Foremost among his teachers and mentors was undoubtedly his uncle Andrea Gabrieli, likewise organist at St Mark’s; he was also in close contact with Orlando di Lasso during his period of service to Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria between 1574 and 1579. Perhaps due to the elitist, exclusive nature of his service to the Venetian state, the bulk of his large-scale ceremonial music was printed in a limited number of monumental retrospective editions, published in 1587 (Concerti di Andrea, & di Gio. Gabrieli, 6–16 voices), 1597 (Sacrae symphoniae, 6–16 voices), and posthumously in 1615 (Symphoniae sacrae [. . .] liber secundus, 6–19 voices; Canzoni et sonate, 3–22 voices). Heir to the 16th-century Venetian musical tradition (as testified by his work as editor of Andrea’s unpublished materials), his memory was by no means obscured by Claudio Monteverdi’s subsequent thirty-year tenure as maestro di cappella. Gabrieli’s compositions circulated widely in northern and central Europe, where their popularity was perhaps furthered by his many pupils (among them Melchior Borchgrevinck, Hans Nielsen, Mogens Pedersøn, Alessandro Tadei, Christoph Cornet, Christoph Kegel, Johann Grabbe, Christoph Clemsee, and the celebrated Heinrich Schütz, all sent to Venice at the expense of their courtly patrons); the many surviving manuscript sources are probably but a fragment of what originally existed. Though few Italians can be unequivocally identified as pupils of Gabrieli, his works are known to have been frequently cited, paraphrased, or reworked by younger northern Italian (above all, Venetian) composers. In general, knowledge of Gabrieli and his milieu has much improved in recent decades, thanks to significant research not only on his biography, his works, and their sources, and the immediate context of his activities at St. Mark’s, but also on the social and economic aspects of daily musical life in what was one of the largest, richest, and most commercially oriented cities on the Italian peninsula. The Venetian musical phenomenon includes, on the one hand, regular or occasional musical activities in the city’s many churches and private palaces (which, together, provided significant earnings for large numbers of musicians, whether or not salaried members of the ducal cappella) and, on the other, the auxiliary trades of music printing and instrument making. Central, too, has been the question of Gabrieli’s and his contemporaries’ music as sound, in terms of both the particular interaction among musical composition, performing forces, space, and the specific liturgical and ceremonial requirements of the Venetian ducal basilica (a question which has engaged generations of researchers) and with regard to the performance of polychoral (and non-polychoral) music elsewhere in the city.