Antonio Vivaldi

Antonio Vivaldi
Vivaldi was born March 4, 1678, in Venice, and was trained by his father, a violinist at Saint Mark's Cathedral. He became a priest in 1703 and began teaching at a school for orphaned girls. He wrote a great deal of music and song for the girls and their concerts, as well as Vivaldi's operas, became famous all over Europe. In 1740 he went to Vienna to serve in the court of Emperor Charles VI in Vienna, but died in Vienna the next year.

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Youth
Antonio Lucio Vivaldi was born on March 4, 1678 in Venice, then capital of the Republic of Venice. He was baptized immediately at his home by the midwife due to "danger of death". It is not known how the life of the infant was in danger but it probably referred to his poor health or to an earthquake that shook the city that day. Vivaldi's official church baptism (at least, the rites which remained other than the actual baptism itself) did not take place until two months later. His father, Giovanni Battista, a barber before becoming a professional violinist, taught him to play violin and then toured Venice playing violin with his young son. Giovanni Battista was one of the founders of the Sovvegno dei musicisti di Santa Cecilia, a sort of trade union for musicians and composers. The president of the association was Giovanni Legrenzi, the maestro di cappella at the Basilica of San Marco and noted early Baroque composer. It is possible that the young Antonio's first lessons in composition were imparted by him. The Luxemburgese scholar Walter Kolneder sees in the early liturgical work Laetatus sum (RV Anh 31, written in 1691, at the age of 13) an influence of Legrenzi's style. His father may have been a composer himself: in 1688 an opera titled La Fedeltà sfortunata was composed by a Giovanni Battista Rossi, and this was the name under which Vivaldi's father had joined the Sovvegno di Santa Cecilia (Rossi for Red, because of the colour of his hair, a family trait).

Antonio Vivaldi’s father was a violinist in the Catherdral of Venice's orchestra and probably Antonio's first teacher. There is much speculation about other teachers, such as Corelli, but no evidence to support this. Vivaldi studied for the priesthood as a young man and was ordained in 1703. He was known for much of his career as “il prete rosso” (the red-haired priest), but soon after his ordination he declined to take on his ecclesiastical duties. Later in life he cited ill health as the reason, but other motivations have been proposed; perhaps Vivaldi simply wanted to explore new opportunties as a composer. It didn't take him long. Landing a job as a violin teacher at a girls’ orphanage in Venice (where he would work in one capacity or another during several stretches of his life), he published a set of trio sonatas and another of violin sonatas. Word of his abilities spread around Europe, and in 1711 an Amsterdam publisher brought out, under the title L'estro armonico (Harmonic Inspiration), a set of Vivaldi's concertos for one or more violins with orchestra. These were best-sellers (it was this group of concertos that spurred Bach's transcriptions), and Vivaldi followed them up with several more equally successful concerto sets. Perhaps the most prolific of all the great European composers, he once boasted that he could compose a concerto faster than a copyist could ready the individual parts for the players in the orchestra. He began to compose operas, worked from 1718 to 1720 in the court of the German principality of Hessen-Darmstadt, and traveled in Austria and perhaps Bohemia.

The Four Seasons (Le quattro stagioni in the original Italian) is a set of four violin concertos written by Antonio Vivaldi in 1723.

The concertos were first published in 1725 as part of a set of 12, Vivaldi’s Op. 8, entitled Il Cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione ("The Contest of Harmony and Invention"). The first four concertos were named after a season and the music illustrates in sound a picture created by an accompanying poem. Each one is in three movements, with a slow movement between two faster ones. The outer movements are usually in ritornello form. (The ritornello is a theme played in the orchestra that returns to punctuate contrasting sections played by the soloist.)

Concerto No. 1 in E major, Op. 8, RV 269, “La primavera” (Spring)
1. Allegro
2. Largo
3. Allegro

The opening of Spring gives out the good cheer of the season, after which we hear a conversation among three birds—or, if you prefer, three violins. After the orchestra gives its imitation of a babbling brook a storm enters, with trembling thunder and flashes of lightning. As the clouds part, the birds return. The long, winding melody of the second movement represents a sleeping goatherd, and the insistent viola notes are the goatherd’s watchful dog. The finale is a graceful shepherd’s song, replete with the drone of bagpipes.