Breaking the canon: Padre Martini’s vision for the canonic genre

[Originally published April 5, 2018]

By the mid-eighteenth century, canons—compositions for multiple instruments or voices in which all the musical material is derived from a single written line of music—had acquired a reputation for abstruseness. They were often deliberately presented as puzzles, utilizing arcane devices like imitation in retrograde, augmentation, diminution, or at a given interval, and leaving it up to performers to divine the intended manner of performance. Their complexity and self-containedness also made them apt emblems of musical craftsmanship that often appeared in artistic depictions of composers: in this Crescimbeni portrait, for example, eighteenth-century composer Padre Giovanni Battista Martini can be seen holding his canon “Quid Vides.”

A manuscript of 303 little-known canons by Martini in Stanford’s Memorial Library of Music, known only by the general title Canoni because its front page has been torn off, deviates strikingly from this tradition. Martini was certainly no stranger to the intellectual side of canonic composition: the first two volumes of his treatise on music history included a series of notoriously difficult puzzle-canons of his own devising on ancient Latin texts. But in this manuscript, the texts he sets—mostly Italian and Bolognese poems he wrote himself—tend toward the lighthearted. In one, he complains of crooked doctors (translations by Maria Massucco):

Elsewhere, Martini vents about the incompetence of singers or lavishes praise on fellow composers or performers. He also depicts humorous moments from his everyday life. In one text, he becomes so excited about a snack that he veers off into nonsense syllables rather than complete the rhyme:

Even when texts are trivial, Martini pays close attention to their musical setting. For “Gia ride primavera,” which describes the play of spring breezes through grasses and flowers, he writes music replete with gentle sighing gestures.

Listen to a performance by Gabriel Ellis and Maria Massucco.

The music of another canon, describing amateur singers who “don’t know solfège,” is deliberately stilted, resembling a vocal exercise. And although compositions of this frivolity are surprising in what is presumably a collection intended for publication, this may be the point. Martini’s letters suggest that he saw in the canon an eminently performable genre and pedagogical tool as well as an intellectual exercise—and if he was trying to prove that canons can be accessible and irreverent, he certainly seems to have succeeded with his student Mozart, who would go on to write the infamous canon “Leck mich im Arsch.”

In 1761, Martini wrote that he was considering publishing a book of canons intended to interest young composers in the genre. This manuscript may have been meant to become that book: clues in its format and contents do at least suggest that it was meant for publication rather than for Martini’s private records. The manuscript is carefully handwritten throughout in Martini’s own hand and is also designed to be durable: the paper is thick and the spine has been reinforced with pigskin. An index of first lines has also been provided and the manner of performance for each canon has been made clear by signs indicating the number of voices and the point at which they are to enter. Martini would hardly have needed these indications, but a publisher would have—and in his later years, Martini was preoccupied with getting his canons published. Although he succeeded once in 1775, when a collection of just 52 was published in Venice, his letters indicate that he continued making inquiries with publishers until nearly the time of his death in 1784.

Martini’s writings elsewhere indicate that he thought the best teaching was done by example, and this manuscript seems to be just that: an example of his vision of what the canon could be. For us, the most notable compositions in it are the most trivial, as these open the clearest windows onto the everyday reality of their world and their composer’s life. And yet, we cannot ignore the manuscript’s conclusion, where Martini breaks the lighthearted character with a remarkable set of twenty canons on the complete Latin text of the Dies Irae from the Mass for the Dead, followed by a final canon on the words “Amen. Amen. Amen.” These settings display a musical sophistication befitting their solemn text, and their inclusion may be merely an attempt to demonstrate compositional prowess and versatility. But we can imagine that for Martini, who was a priest as well as a composer and scholar, they served a dual purpose—at the end of a collection containing more than a little irreverence, this Dies Irae might just represent his little bit of repentance.

Gabriel Ellis received his Ph.D. in musicology from Stanford University in 2023.

Maria Massucco received her Ph.D. in Italian from Stanford University in 2023.

This article is one in a series highlighting rare music materials in the Stanford Libraries collections.