Giovanni Battista Martini

Padre Martini, born at Bologna in 1706, was a Franciscan, a composer and the most consulted teacher of counterpoint in eighteenth-century Europe; the young Mozart came to him in 1770 and Johann Christian Bach studied with him for years. He assembled one of the largest music libraries of his age and wrote an unfinished history of music, alongside masses, oratorios, keyboard sonatas and a quantity of instrumental music. He died in Bologna in 1784. His father, the violinist Antonio Maria Martini, gave him his first lessons, and counterpoint came from Antonio Riccieri and Giacomo Antonio Perti; he took the Franciscan habit in September 1722 and was appointed chapel-master at the Basilica of San Francesco in Bologna three years later, at nineteen. The school of composition he opened there rested on his declared preference for the older Roman tradition. Burney put his library at seventeen thousand volumes; part of it went to the imperial library in Vienna after his death and the remainder stayed in Bologna, where it is now in the Museo Internazionale della Musica.