Martini, Giovanni Battista 04/24/1706 - 08/03/1784

Giovanni Battista Martini (1706-1784) was an Italian writer on music, music theoretician, composer and teacher. In 1722 he joined the Minorite order. In 1725 he became maestro di cappella of the Franciscan church in Bologna, where his compositions drew attention from all of Europe.



In his hometown he founded a music school which after his death was continued by his student Mattei until well into the 19th century and trained many renowned artists from Italy and abroad. As a teacher he preferred the old Roman compositional tradition. He was a significant music theoretician, who owned a library of about 15,000 volumes. Leopold Mozart on one of his trips to Italy stopped in Bologna in order to introduce his son's art to Martini. Martini did indeed take the young Mozart under his wing and helped him obtain an honorable professorship. Other composers, like Johann Christian Bach, Vicente Martín y Soler, Christoph Willibald Gluck, Niccolò Jommelli und André Grétry also sought Martini's advice.