Andrea Gabrieli

No images for this composer are legitimate: the ones you see on Google or assorted CD covers for him, for example, are invariably of the astronomer [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jun/13/groundbreaking-astronomer-kepler-may-have-practised-alchemy“ target=“_blank Kepler], the musician [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Annibale_Carracci_004.jpg” target=“_blank Claudio Merulo], the lute player [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Annibale_Carracci_004.jpg” target=“_blank Giulio Mascheroni] or [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Maximilian_III,_Archduke_of_Austria.jpg” target=“_blank Maxmillian III, Archduke of Austria]. One [https://music.fandom.com/ro/wiki/Andrea_Gabrieli” target=“_blank Romanian 'fan' website] even manages to assign a portrait of Claudio Monteverdi to him!

He therefore gets one of this site's 'Anonymous' images, I'm afraid -but his portrait is not the only confused thing about this composer, for whilst Wikipedia has him with dates 1532/1533 – 1585, citing 'Groves Online' as the source, my 1980 copy of the New Groves has him being born in “c.1510” and dying in 1586. A discrepancy in a birth date is not too surprising, given the state of record-keeping (and surviving) in the 16th Century, but a gap of 22 or 23 years is nevertheless unusually large. [https://www.britannica.com/biography/Andrea-Gabrieli” target=“_blank Encylopedia Brittanica] agrees with Wikipedia, if we're taking votes.

It turns out that the 1510ish birth-date cited by the 1980 New Groves was a consequence of the work of one Francesco Caffi, a musicologist from Padua (1778-1874), who wrote in his Storia generale della musica presso i Veneziani (General History of the Music of the Venetians) that Andrea was singing as a chorister at St. Mark's, Venice, in 1536 which would be a bit tricky if he was only 3 years old! A 20-something singing at St. Mark's would be quite reasonable, however. Accordingly, from about the 1820s onwards, a 1510ish birth date was generally assumed and became sanctified by the original Groves encyclopædia (my 1940 edition has the 1510-1586 date range, for example). This date range was then unquestioningly re-used in my 1980 edition of the New Groves. His year of death was also cited by the New Groves as 1586 because, “his successor at St. Mark's was appointed at the end of December 1586, [so] it seems probable that he died shortly before this.”

That, however, is erroneous back-tracking of events, as was eventually proved when the register entry containing his death date was finally located in the mid-1980s, long after my New Groves had gone to print…and it is dated August 30th, 1585. It also contains the notation that the man was “about 52 years old”, allowing us to back-deduce a birth-date of around 1532 or 1533. So now we actually know a proper death-date and an approximate birth-date, and this site will adopt the newly-researched 1532-1585 dates for the man: Francesco Caffi, it turns out, was simply wrong.

Whatever mysteries surround the man, however, we can confidently assert that he brought an international stature to the school of Venetian composers, following a period when composers from the Flemish/Netherlands had dominated. He was accordingly extremely important in spreading the Venetian style around Italy and Germany -and thus warrants a large 6-page entry in New Groves (though 3 of them are given over to listing his compositions!). Particularly after gaining the post of organist at St. Mark's in 1566, his music leaves behind the Flemish-inflected contrapuntal style and adopts a more antiphonal style (taking advantage of the cavernous acoustic of St. Mark's), involving back-and-forth exchanges of the same thematic material between different instrumental and vocal groups. A polychoral approach also works well in St. Mark's, and Andrea certainly exploited it (i.e., multiple choirs, singing whilst distributed about the church, in alternation), thereby codifying one of the major stylistic developments which led directly to the formation of what is now known as the Baroque style.

Very little of his vast output was published in his lifetime: that was a job his nephew (Giovanni Gabrieli) undertook from 1587 onwards, after his death.

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