Giovanni Battista Martini

Giovanni Battista or Giambattista Martini,, also known as Padre Martini, was an Italian Conventual Franciscan friar, who was a leading musician, composer, and music historian of the period and a mentor to Mozart.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article on Giovanni Battista Martini.

From the period sources

Giovanni Battista Martini, often known as Padre Martini, was a celebrated figure in 18th-century music, intimately connected with the intellectual life of Bologna. He was an esteemed teacher, with Ferdinando Giuseppe Bertoni and Giovanni Giuseppe Cambini both studying counterpoint under him, the latter for three years (Brown’s Biographical Dictionary, 1886; Biographie universelle des musiciens, Vol. 3, 1837). Martini’s scholarship was widely recognized; the Spanish Jesuit Stefano Arteaga, for instance, lived in friendly intercourse with him at Bologna, encouraged by Martini to write his celebrated history of Italian opera (A Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, 1900; Dictionary of Music, 1896). Giovanni Francesco Beccatelli, a Florentine writer, also had papers praised by Padre Martini (A Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, 1900).

Martini himself was the author of the ambitious Storia della Musica, a “learned and curious work” of which only two volumes had been published by 1775, thirteen years apart, leading contemporaries to “despair of ever seeing it completed” (A General History of the Science and Practice of Music, Vol. 1, 1875). By 1771, only one volume was publicly available, and in it, Martini delved deeply into the music of the Hebrews, though relying primarily on the Talmud and Rabbinical writings, which limited the scope of a “satisfactory account” (A General History of the Science and Practice of Music, Vol. 1, 1875). His expertise extended to practical matters, as evidenced by his possession of a manuscript copy of Giovanni Maria Nanini’s treatise on counterpoint and his conversations on music with the then ninety-year-old composer Jacopo Antonio Perti in 1750 (Biographie universelle des musiciens, Vol. 7, 1837, 1866). Even in the realm of music printing, “Martini’s first opera of Concertos” was among the early works to be stamped on plates by a Frenchman named Fortier, whose methods were later “stolen” and improved upon in England (A General History of the Science and Practice of Music, Vol. 2, 1875).