Antonio Vivaldi

Antonio Lucio Vivaldi was baptised on 4 March 1678 in Venice, the eldest child of a barber-turned-violinist at the Basilica di San Marco. His red hair earned him the nickname 'il prete rosso' — the red priest — throughout his life. He was ordained as a priest in 1703 but almost immediately granted dispensation from saying Mass, apparently on grounds of a chronic chest condition, likely severe asthma or bronchial illness, that would plague him all his life. In the same year he was appointed as a violin teacher at the Ospedale della Pietà, a Venetian institution providing care, education, and musical training to illegitimate, orphaned, and indigent girls. The Pietà's all-female ensemble performed regularly for paying audiences and was one of the finest musical establishments in Europe; visitors from across the continent came to Venice specifically to hear it. Vivaldi remained associated with the Pietà for most of the next four decades, with periodic interruptions when he was dismissed — only to be re-hired, sometimes within months. The relationship was the engine of his extraordinary output. To supply the Pietà's concert programs he composed concertos at a rate that astonished contemporaries: his surviving catalogue runs to approximately 500 concertos, 46 operas, and extensive sacred and secular vocal music. The concerto form as it came down through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — three movements (fast–slow–fast), clear alternation between solo and orchestra (ritornello structure), and descriptive emotional contrast between movements — was systematised and spread through Europe largely by Vivaldi. Johann Sebastian Bach transcribed nine of his concertos for keyboard, transmitting the idiom into the German tradition. The Four Seasons (Le quattro stagioni), published in 1725 as the first four concertos of Op. 8 (Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione — The Contest Between Harmony and Invention), are the most celebrated instance of his descriptive writing. Each concerto is paired with a sonnet (possibly written by Vivaldi himself) and annotated in the score to align specific passages with lines of text: a sleeping goatherd, a thunderstorm, a harvest dance, a frozen landscape. The writing anticipates programme music by more than a century. Vivaldi also pursued a parallel career as an opera impresario and composer, writing at least forty-six operas between 1713 and 1739 and staging productions in Venice, Mantua, Rome, and elsewhere. His operatic career was not uniformly successful — a planned production in Ferrara was cancelled in 1737 when the city's cardinal refused to permit a priest-impresario to enter — and his later years saw declining fortune as musical taste shifted away from his style. In 1740, aged sixty-two, Vivaldi left Venice for Vienna, probably hoping to obtain imperial patronage from Charles VI. Charles died in October 1740, removing his most significant potential patron. Vivaldi died in Vienna on 28 July 1741, buried in a pauper's grave in a churchyard attached to the Bürgerspital (now the site of the Vienna Technical University). His estate was sold to cover his debts. The vast bulk of his manuscripts — thousands of pages — had been sold by the Pietà at his death and passed through several hands before being acquired by the Biblioteca Nazionale di Torino in 1930, where they remain. The twentieth-century rediscovery of Vivaldi, driven particularly by the musicologist Marc Pincherle and by the performances of Alfredo Casella and later I Musici, restored him to the front rank of European Baroque composers.

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