Antonio Vivaldi

The name Vivaldi is known to countless people across the world simply because they have heard of “The Four Seasons” (Le quattro stagioni)—even if they have never listened to any of the music. Music lovers today generally know a handful of other concertos too and some vocal works of Vivaldi’s that have become favorites, notably the Stabat Mater, RV 621 (1712), the more famous of his two settings of the Gloria, RV 589 (1716), and the motet Nullo in mundo pax sincera, RV 630). Even so, hundreds of his 700-odd compositions remain unfamiliar—to performers, let alone their audiences—because the sheer number of them is difficult to fathom and because some appeared in modern edition only very recently. His reputation needed to be built again, for almost all his music and many facts about his career were forgotten in the late 18th century. Knowledge of him would have remained sketchy at best if his collection of his own manuscripts, sold off after his death, had not been rediscovered in the 1930s and then preserved in the National Library in Turin. Together with a significant collection of manuscripts in Dresden’s Saxon State Library, this priceless archive has been the starting point for almost all research on Vivaldi’s music and, of course, for the making of editions on which modern performances and recordings are based. This modern revival has revealed Vivaldi as one of the most innovative and influential musicians of the late part of the Baroque era.

Early Years: Early Success

Born in Venice and trained in music mostly by his father, Antonio Vivaldi took holy orders but did not pursue a priestly career. The early reputation he gained instead was as a virtuoso violinist, the composer of 12 trio sonatas published in 1705 (including the variations on La Follia, RV 63) and 12 violin sonatas (1709), and the master of violin employed by the Ospedale della Pietà, Venice’s charitable institution that cared for foundlings. The Pietà raised part of its income by giving public concerts for tourists of vocal and instrumental music, performed exclusively by remarkably skilled women inmates who were trained, from childhood, for that purpose. Misunderstandings persist about the Pietà and its music. It was not an orphanage or girls’ school, nor were the performers young girls (those who gave the public concerts were all adults, some continuing into old age); and there was nothing amateurish about their music-making, which achieved standards of virtuosity as high as any in Europe, rivaling those of professional male musicians. In an age when women were almost never permitted to perform music in public, the success of this unique phenomenon of an all-female orchestra and choir can be attributed largely to Vivaldi, who served as the maestro de’ concerti (concertmaster), responsible for rehearsing the ensembles and providing the women with new instrumental works.

Vivaldi: Sonata in D minor for Two Violins and Continuo, RV 63, “La Follia”

Middle Period

An International Reputation

Although many of Vivaldi’s earliest concertos have not survived, the 12 in his third printed collection (Op. 3, L’estro armonico, 1711) represent very well the astonishingly original music that, by 1710, he was regularly supplying for the Pietà and sometimes for other patrons too. Not orchestral in the modern sense, they are complex one-to-a-part chamber music exploring a rich variety of solo combinations, featuring flamboyant string playing with immensely strong rhythmic drive in fast movements and contrasting pathos in slow movements. No. 8 in A minor, RV 522,  and No. 10 in B minor, RV 580, are fine examples. With this single collection, published in Amsterdam and then widely distributed, Vivaldi gained recognition across Europe for trend-setting experimentation. His brand of ritornello form for fast movements of concertos became a hugely influential model for other composers, even for instrumentally-accompanied vocal compositions, including opera arias and choruses in sacred pieces such as J. S. Bach’s.

New Departures

Vivaldi soon embraced opportunities to produce vocal music: the Stabat Mater (Brescia, 1712) and his first opera, Ottone in villa (Vicenza, 1713). His ambitions in the commercial business of opera now became the dominant driving force of his career, for which he preferred to operate as theater impresario and musical director, as well as composer. He and his father managed Venice’s Sant’Angelo theater in 1713–18, staging six new Vivaldi operas, as well as works by other composers. Some of the evocative sounds of nature that we hear in “The Four Seasons” (dating from 1716–20, though not published until 1725) are related to the imaginative music in his operas of this period. Around this time, Vivaldi was prevailed upon to compose sacred vocal works for the Pietà during the absence of the official maestro di coro and the long interregnum while the post remained unfilled—from 1713 to 1718. This sudden need to compose sacred music on demand and in considerable quantity (requiring the traditional skills of counterpoint and fugue, in which Vivaldi had received little or no training) explains why such works as the Gloria, RV 589, or the Magnificat, RV 610 (c. 1715), contain extraordinarily inventive music, enhanced considerably by his expertise in writing for instruments and his new abilities with opera arias.

The Height of Achievement

From 1718 to 1720, during his residence in Mantua as director of secular music at the ducal court, Vivaldi mostly composed chamber cantatas and instrumental pieces. Many of his concertos given allusive titles (Il piacere, Il sospetto, La caccia, to name but a few) date from around this time and are evidence of his tendency to associate instrumental pieces with extramusical ideas. Following his return to Venice, the 1720s became his most successful period, commercially and artistically, both with opera (in Rome and several other centers besides Venice) and as a supplier of concertos of many types. From 1723 to 1729 he was under contract to provide the Pietà with two new concertos per month, and, when residing in the city, to rehearse them too. This high rate of production is reflected in the way he composed. His manuscripts show that he typically penned music rapidly, with scarcely any revision, and with free-flowing invention of solo passages in a manner akin to improvisation. The Concerto in B-flat major, RV 547, featuring violin and cello soloists, is a fine example of his mature work; in it we hear many of the idiosyncrasies that made Vivaldi’s style unique.

Vivaldi: Concerto in B-flat major for Violin, Cello, Strings, and Continuo, RV 547

Late Period: Increasing Challenges, Diminishing Returns

By the early 1730s, Vivaldi’s star was waning. His late operas, though often successful, could not compete with the new fashion for Neapolitan opera. Rumors of an improper relationship with Anna Girò—his preferred prima donna from 1726 to 1741, with whom he traveled for opera productions away from Venice—were almost certainly unfounded but in 1737 caused an archbishop to veto his presence in Ferrara. Vivaldi had by 1730 stopped preparing compositions for publication; he claimed that he could earn more by selling manuscripts of individual concertos for one guinea each. The Pietà, which re-employed him intermittently from 1735, continued to purchase concertos from him as late as 1740. He traveled to Vienna that summer, having accepted an invitation to direct opera in the 1740–41 season, but that prospect for much-needed income came to nothing, with the closing of the theaters following the death, in October, of the emperor Charles VI. In ill health, and by now very short of funds, Vivaldi himself died in Vienna in July 1741. Though the opera he had planned to mount was staged there the following year, this was a sad end for a great pioneering figure in European music.

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