Giovanni Gabrieli

There are no known portraits of this composer. The one you'll see most commonly on CD covers and the like is this one by Annibale Carracci. That's because the painting was originally thought to be of the actor Giovanni Gabrieli, and the names being identical to the composer, an inevitable cross-identification was made. Anyway: the 'standard' portrait is now known not to be of our man at all, but of one Giulio Mascheroni of Bologna. Our man was instead born in Venice in about 1554, became the biggest musical influence in Venice, and died in Venice in 1612. Venice, in other words; not Bologna!

We similarly lack good information about when Giovanni was born. We know for a certainty that he died in 1612 and the Venice death records state that he was 56 (which, for the mathematically challenged, would put his birth date back in 1556. But the handwriting on the document is poor, it might be saying he was 58 years old …and therefore, he might have been born back in 1554. We just don't know for sure, one way or another.

What we can say with certainty is that he was the nephew of Andrea Gabrieli (who it is thought taught Giovanni music) and represents the highest point of the Venetian school of the High Renaisssance which had begun with Willaert and developed through the achievements of Andrea Gabrieli and Claudio Morulo. His influence on a number of pupils, including Schütz, makes him one of the most significant historical figures of the time.

He worked in Munich for a time, with a madrigal of his appearing in a 1575 publication there. Court records from Munich show he was still being paid a salary there in 1578 -but his employer, the Duke Albrecht V, died in 1579 and it's likely Gabrieli moved back to Venice shortly thereafter. He is known to have been the temporary organist of St. Mark's Venice in 1584 -a position that was made permanent the next year. He remained the organist there until his death.

His earliest music shows the heavy influence of his uncle and of Lassus, but he soon developed individual characteristics of his own. He composed almost only sacred music or instrumental music, ignoring light secular forms such as the canzonetta. Additionally, he seldom wrote for small scale choirs: his domain was St. Mark's and accordingly his choral music is almost always large-scale and typically uses the cori spezzati technique -literally, 'broken choruses', meaning physically separate choirs dispersed around the cavernous interior of St. Mark's and thus making possible the Venetian 'polychoral' sound-world of spatial contrast that was to become so important in the Baroque period. In Gabrieli's hands, the style was to be developed in new and subtle ways, with thematic material being developed rather than being answered almost exactly by each choir in dialogue with each other. His most influential publication was probably the Sacrae symphoniae of 1597, which include lots of double-choir motets, along with plenty of single and more-than-two choir ones:

A minor detail to note is that the collection is often called 'Symphoniae Sacrae' in CD booklets, but the previous score cover page makes it clear that that's incorrect! A second collection of his works with the same sort of title was published in 1615, after his death: from this screenshot of its front page:

…you can see that it was titled Symphoniae sacrae, whence the confusion arises. Edition 1 is 'Sacrae symphoniae'; Edition 2 is 'Symphoniae sacrae'! For consistency of cataloguing, I tag them all as 'Sacrae symphoniae' with an appropriate date to keep the collection source obvious. Thus, I'll have items in my collection tagged Sacrae symphoniae 1615 (Cleobury - 2015) and Sacrae symphoniae 1597 (Nevel - 1993).

Gabrieli suffered from a kidney stone from 1606 onwards, causing him to spend increasing amounts of time away from St. Mark's, to the point that a deputy had to be appointed to fill in for him. He was to die from said kidney stone in August 1612.