Customer Reviews (1)

Star of the Adriatic Sea
Gabrieli was the star of the Adriatic, the most respected composer in Venice around 1600. His music still appeals today, even to people without formal training. I have his music playing in my cubicle in the hospital every day for the past 30 years. Indigent and unsophisticated patients are so moved that I have given away dozens of CD's of his music to newly-created fans. Yet his works are almost unknown to the general music- loving population. This could be because next to nothing is known about the man. He does not emerge with a strong personality to be popularized in book or film like Mozart, Wagner, Beethoven, or evn Marais.
Kenton's study was the first major English analysis of Gabrieli's style, life, and works. The previous work, done in German in 1834, is the only other study up to then. Though some new material has been discovered, largely by Richard Charteris, and a painting of him playing a lute exists in Dresden, unknown to Kenton, most of the recent work by Charteris, Arnold, and Selfridge use Kenton as a starting basis. It is a comprehensive book, full of documents, quotes, and has a thematic index. It is definitely not a historical novel. Nonetheless, a picture of Gabrieli can be conjectured. He seemed to be industrious, totally non-narcissistic, dedicated to writing, playing, and teaching. We see him as loved by his students, who traveled from as far away as Germany to study with him (Schutz and Hassler). They were sorrowed by his painful death from a kidney stone. We get a hazy but well-defined view of the creator of the music that was the summation of the Renaissance and the genesis of the Baroque. If that appeals to you, then get this hard-to-find book. ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from Europe, 1450 to 1789: An Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World, brought to you by Gale®, a part of Cengage Learning, a world leader in e-research and educational publishing for libraries, schools and businesses.The length of the article is 1086 words.The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase.You can view it with any web browser.Explores European history from 1450-1789, from the print revolution to the French Revolution. Includes articles written by eminent scholars covering major topics in art, government, and education as well as providing biographical entries on key figures of the period. Also covers topics specific to the era, such as apocalypticism, guilds, food riots, royal mistresses and lovers, the Spanish Inquisition, Utopia and others. ... Read more