GABRIELI, GIOVANNI. – Musician, b. in Venice in 1557, d. there on 12 sg. 1612; from 1575 to 1579 he was in the musical chapel of the court of Munich, then under the direction of Orlando di Lasso; in 1586 he succeeded Claudio Merulo at the first organ of the basilica of S. Marco in Venice, where he remained in that office until his death.
Nephew and pupil of Andrea G., he is closely connected with his uncle’s personality, not only for these reasons, but also because of a profound spiritual affinity. Without establishing dependencies and relationships understood in an overly material sense, one must in fact take into account a continuation of the expressive characteristics so admirably achieved in the work of Andrea G. G. G. himself felt this spiritual filiation and, in the preface to the Conti e Concerti of 1587, which gathers compositions by both men, while clearly recognizing his uncle’s artistic qualities, he proceeded to « indicere altre» the intimate reasons for his own formation, the predilections that had determined his style. Everything briefly mentioned concerning Andrea G. must therefore be kept in mind as a necessary premise for the subsequent artistic development of G. G., who not only makes versatile use of what had been transmitted to him, but achieves a distinct originality through the incomparable vigor of his rich imagination. With G. G., the musical picture seems to expand to the dimensions of the frescoes and canvases that contemporary Venetian painters conceived with equal variety of foreshortenings, movements, and figures; in this connection, evident common characteristics are usually rightly noted and described, serving as clear indications of intimate spiritual affinities. The growing number of musical parts, which in polychoral distribution reaches as many as 22, is used by G. G. to create structures of monumental grandeur, in which the novelty of the expressive detail is harmoniously balanced with the cohesion of the whole. Of decisive importance is the union of instruments with voices, already initiated by Andrea G., not as accompaniment or doubling, but as an element of indispensable integration within the overall conception: the timbres of wind and string instruments, alone or blended with the various vocal registers, produce a coloristic richness of unequalled splendor. G. G.’s art both sums up and unfolds the characteristics of the Venetian style, which through him acquires a European resonance; beyond its value in itself, it seems to assert itself as an example of a «modern» art, renewed upon the glorious trunk of polyphony. In this regard, the most representative works are the Symphoniae sacrae (1597 and 1613), which exerted a profound influence on the development of European music in the seventeenth century; just as Andrea G. had Hassler and Sweelinck as pupils, so G. G. had as a pupil one of the greatest musicians of the entire seventeenth century, Enrico Schürz. His contemporaries were highly responsive to a certain prevalence of fantastic sonorities, but religious expression is more discernible in the richness of the imagination with which counterpoint is bent to interpret sacred texts, understood with the same dramatic and evocative mobility as profane ones. G. G.’s purely instrumental work likewise marks a moment of great importance for the autonomous development of forms by then clearly defined in the sonorous nature of the individual instruments.