Antonio Lucio Vivaldi (March 4, 1678 – July 27 or 28, 1741), nicknamed Il Prete Rosso ("The Red Priest"), was a Venetian priest and baroque music composer, as well as a famous virtuoso violinist; he was born and raised in the Republic of Venice. The Four Seasons, a series of four violin concertos, is his best known work and a highly popular Baroque music piece.
Antonio Lucio Vivaldi was born in Venice, the capital of the Republic of Venice. He was baptized immediately at his home by the midwife. It is not known how the life of the infant was in danger, but the immediate baptism was most likely due 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 the 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 St. Mark's Basilica 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).
Vivaldi had a medical problem which he called the tightening of the chest (probably some form of asthma). His medical problem, however, did not prevent him from learning to play the violin, composing and taking part in the prescribed musical activities. At the age of 15 (1693), he began studying to become a priest. In 1703, at the age of 25, Vivaldi was ordained as a priest, soon nicknamed Il Prete Rosso, "The Red Priest", probably because of his red hair.
Not long after his ordination, in 1704, he was given a dispensation from celebrating the Holy Mass because of his ill health. In late 1706 he withdrew from active priesthood.
On 1 December 1703, Vivaldi became maestro di violino (master of violin) at an orphanage called the Pio Ospedale della Pietà (Devout Hospital of Mercy) in Venice. There were four such institutions in Venice. Their purpose was to give shelter and education to children who were abandoned, orphaned, or whose families could not support them. They were financed by funds provided by the Republic. The boys learned a trade and had to leave at age 15. The girls received musical education and the most talented stayed and became members of the Ospedale's renowned orchestra and choir.
Shortly after his appointment, the orphans began to gain appreciation and esteem abroad, too; Vivaldi wrote for them most of his concertos, cantatas, and sacred music. In 1704 the position of teacher of viola all'inglese was added to his duty as violin instructor.
His relation with the board of directors of the Ospedale was often strained. The board had to take a vote every year on whether to keep a teacher. The vote on Vivaldi was seldom unanimous and in 1709 he lost his job after a 7 against 6 vote. After a year as free-lance musician, he was recalled by the Ospedale with a unanimous vote in 1711; clearly the board had realized the importance of his role by then. In 1713 he became responsible for the musical activity of the institute. Vivaldi was promoted to maestro de' concerti in 1716.
It was during these years that Vivaldi wrote much of his music, including many operas and concerti. In 1705, the first collection (Raccolta) of his works was published: his Opus 1 is a collection of 12 sonatas for two violins and basso continuo, still in a conventional style. In 1709 a second collection of 12 sonatas for violin & basso continuo appeared (Opus 2). The real breakthrough came with his first collection of 12 concerti for one, two, and four violins with strings, L'Estro Armonico (Opus 3), that was published in Amsterdam in 1711 by Estienne Roger. This was a resounding success all over Europe, and was followed in 1714 by La Stravaganza (Opus 4), a collection of concerti for solo violin and strings.
In February 1711, Vivaldi and his father went to Brescia where his setting of the Stabat Mater (RV 621) was played as part of a religious festival. The work seems to have been written in haste: the string parts are simple, the music of the first three movements is repeated in the next three, and not all the text is set. However, and in part as a consequence of the forced essentiality of the music, the work reveals musical and emotional depth and is one of his early masterpieces.
In 1718, Vivaldi began to travel. Despite his frequent travels, the Pietà paid him to write two concertos a month for the orchestra and to rehearse with them at least four times when in Venice. The Pietà's records show that he was paid for 140 concertos between 1723 and 1729.
In the Venice of the early 18th century, opera was the most popular musical entertainment and the most profitable for the composer. There were several theaters competing for the public attention. Vivaldi started his career as opera writer in undertone: his first opera, Ottone in villa (RV 729) was performed not in Venice, but at the Garzerie theater in Vicenza in 1713. The following year, Vivaldi made the jump to Venice and became the impresario of the theater Sant'Angelo in Venice, where his opera Orlando finto pazzo (RV 727) was performed. However, the work did not meet the public taste and Vivaldi had to close it after a couple of weeks and replace it with a rerun of a different work already given the previous year. In 1715, he presented Nerone fatto Cesare (RV 724, lost), with music by seven different composers, of which he was the leader with eleven arias. This time it was a success and in the late season Vivaldi planned to give an opera completely of his own hand, Arsilda regina di Ponto (RV 700). However, the state censor blocked the performance; he objected to the plot: the main character, Arsilda, falls in love with another woman, Lisea, who is pretending to be a man. Vivaldi managed to get the opera through censorship the following year, and it was eventually performed to a resounding success.
In this same period of time, the Pietà commissioned several liturgical works. The most important were two oratorios. The first, Moyses Deus Pharaonis (RV 643) is unfortunately lost. The second, Juditha triumphans (RV 644), composed in 1716, is one of his sacred masterpieces. It was commissioned to celebrate the victory of the Republic of Venice against the Turks and the recapture of the island of Corfù. All eleven singing parts were performed by girls of the Pietà, both for the female and male characters. Many of the arias included parts by solo instruments: recorders, oboes, clarinets, viola d'amore, mandolins, that showcased the range of talents of the girls.
In the same year 1716, Vivaldi wrote and produced two more operas, L'incoronazione di Dario (RV 719) and La costanza trionfante degli amori e degli odi (RV 706). The latter was so popular that it was re-edited and represented two years later with the title Artabano re dei Parti (RV 701, lost); and was eventually performed in Prague in 1732. In the following years, Vivaldi wrote several operas that were performed all over Italy.
His modern operatic style caused him some trouble with other more conservative musicians, like Benedetto Marcello, a magistrate and amateur musician, who wrote a pamphlet against him and the modern style of opera. The pamphlet is called Il teatro alla moda, and its cover has a caricature of Vivaldi playing the violin. The Marcello family was the rightful owner of the Sant'Angelo theater and a long legal battle had been fought with the management for its restitution, without success. The booklet attacks Vivaldi without mentioning him directly. The cover drawing shows a boat (the Sant'Angelo), on the left end of which stands a little angel wearing a priest hat and playing the violin. It is a caricature of Vivaldi. The obscure writing under the picture mentions nonexistent places and names. In particular, ALDIVIVA is an anagram of A. Vivaldi.
In 1717 or 1718, Vivaldi was offered a new prestigious position as Maestro di Cappella of the court of the prince Phillip of Hesse-Darmstadt, governor of Mantua. He moved there for three years and produced several operas, among which was Tito Manlio (RV 738). In 1721, he was in Milan, presenting the pastoral drama La Silvia (RV 734, lost) and again the next year with the oratorio L'adorazione delli tre re magi al bambino Gesù (RV 645, also lost). The next big step was a move to Rome in 1722, where his operas introduced the new style and where the new pope Benedict XIII invited Vivaldi to play for him. In 1725, he returned to Venice, where he produced four operas in the same year.
It is also in this period that he wrote the Four Seasons, four violin concertos depicting natural scenes in music. While three of the concerti are of original conception, the first, "Spring", borrows motifs from a Sinfonia in the first act of his opera "Il Giustino," composed the same time of the Four Seasons. The inspiration for them was probably the countryside around Mantua. They were a revolution in musical conception: in them Vivaldi represented flowing creeks, singing birds (of different species, each specifically characterised), barking dogs, buzzing mosquitoes, crying shepherds, storms, drunken dancers, silent nights, hunting parties (both from the hunter's and the prey's point of view), frozen landscapes, children ice-skating, and burning fires. Each concerto was associated with a sonnet of Vivaldi's hand, describing the scenes depicted in the music. They were published as the first four of a collection of twelve, Il cimento dell'Armonia e dell'Inventione, his Opus 8, published in Amsterdam by Le Cène in 1725.
During his time in Mantua, Vivaldi became acquainted with an aspiring young singer, Anna Giro, who was to become his student, protegee, and favorite prima donna until the end of his life. Despite rumors to the contrary, there is no evidence that Vivaldi's and Giro's relationship ever went beyond friendship and professional collaboration.
At the height of his career, Vivaldi received commissions from European nobles and royalty. The wedding cantata Gloria e Imeneo (RV 687) was written for the marriage of Louis XV. Opus 9, La Cetra, was dedicated to Emperor Charles VI. Vivaldi had the chance to meet the Emperor in person in 1728, when he came to Trieste to oversee the construction of a new port. Charles admired the music of the Red Priest so much that he is said to have spoken more with the composer in that occasion than with his ministers in two years. He gave him the title of knight, a gold medal, and an invitation to come to Vienna. On his part, Vivaldi gave Charles a manuscript copy of La Cetra; this is a set of concertos almost completely different from the one published with the same title as Opus 9. Probably the printing had been delayed and Vivaldi was forced to gather an improvised collection.
In 1730, accompanied by his father, he traveled to Vienna and Prague, where his opera Farnace (RV 711) was presented. Some late operas marked the collaboration with two of Italy's major writers of the time. L'Olimpiade and Catone in Utica were written by Pietro Metastasio, the major representative of the Arcadian movement and court poet in Vienna. La Griselda was rewritten by the young Carlo Goldoni from an earlier libretto by Apostolo Zeno.
Vivaldi's life, like those of many composers of the time, ended in financial difficulties. His compositions no longer held the high esteem they once did in Venice; changing musical tastes quickly made them outmoded, and Vivaldi, in response, chose to sell off sizeable numbers of his manuscripts at paltry prices to finance a migration to Vienna. Reasons for Vivaldi's departure from Venice are unclear, but it seems likely that he wished to meet Charles VI, who appreciated his compositions (Vivaldi dedicated La Cetra to Charles in 1727), and take up the position of a composer in the Imperial Court. It is ever more likely that Vivaldi went to Vienna to stage operas, especially as his place of residence was near the Karntner Tor Theater. However, shortly after Vivaldi's arrival at Vienna, Charles died. This tragic stroke of bad luck left the composer without royal protection and a source of income. Vivaldi had to sell off more manuscripts to make ends meet and eventually died not long after, on either 27 July or 28 July, 1741, of internal fire (which was probably from the asthma that he had been suffering from) in a house owned by the widow of a Viennese saddle-maker. On 28 July he was buried in a simple grave at the Hospital Burial Ground in Vienna (the assumption that the young Joseph Haydn sang in the choir at Vivaldi's burial was based on the mistranscription of a primary source and has been proven wrong).
His burial spot is next to the Karlskirche in Vienna, at the site of the Technical Institute. The house he lived in while in Vienna was torn down. In its place there is now the Hotel Sacher. Memorial plaques have been placed at both locations, as well as a Vivaldi star in the Viennese Musikmeile and a monument at the Rooseveltsplatz.
Many of Vivaldi's compositions reflect a buoyant, almost playful, exuberance which are in direct contrast with the dignified seriousness of much Baroque music in his time. Most of Vivaldi's repertoire was rediscovered only in the first half of the 20th century in Turin and Genoa and was published in the second half. Vivaldi's music is innovative, breaking a consolidated tradition in schemes; he gave brightness to the formal and the rhythmic structure of the concerto, repeatedly looking for harmonic contrasts and invented innovative melodies and themes. Moreover, Vivaldi was able to compose non-academic music, particularly meant to be appreciated by the wide public and not only by an intellectual minority. The joyful appearance of his music reveals in this regard a transmissible joy of composing. These are among the causes of the vast popularity of his music. This popularity soon made him famous in other countries such as France which was, at the time, very independent concerning its musical taste.
Vivaldi is considered one of the composers who brought Baroque music (with its typical contrast among heavy sonorities) to evolve into a classical style. Johann Sebastian Bach was deeply influenced by Vivaldi's concertos and arias (recalled in his Johannes Passion, Matthäuspassion, and cantatas). Bach transcribed a number of Vivaldi's concertos for solo keyboard, along with a number for orchestra, including the famous Concerto for Four Violins and Violoncello, Strings and Continuo (RV 580).
Vivaldi remained unknown for his published concerti, and largely ignored, even after the resurgence of interest in Bach, pioneered by Mendelssohn. Even his most famous work, The Four Seasons, was unknown in its original edition. In the early 20th century Fritz Kreisler's concerto in the style of Vivaldi, which he passed off as an original Vivaldi work but which was actually by Kreisler, helped revive Vivaldi's fortunes. This impelled the French scholar Marc Pincherle to begin academic work on Vivaldi's oeuvre. The discovery of many Vivaldi manuscripts and their acquisition by the National University of Turin Library, with the generous sponsorship of Roberto Foa and Filippo Giordano (in memory of their sons, respectively, Mauro and Renzo), led to renewed interest in Vivaldi. People such as Marc Pincherle, Mario Rinaldi, Alfredo Casella, Ezra Pound, Olga Rudge, Arturo Toscanini, and Louis Kaufman were instrumental in the Vivaldi revival of the 20th century. The resurrection of Vivaldi's unpublished works in the 20th century is mostly thanks to the efforts of Alfredo Casella, who in 1939 organised the now historic Vivaldi Week, in which the rediscovered Gloria (RV 589) and l'Olimpiade were first heard again. Since WW II, Vivaldi's compositions have enjoyed almost universal success, and the advent of historically informed performances has only increased his fame. In 1947, the Venetian businessman Antonio Fanna founded the Istituto Italiano Antonio Vivaldi, with the composer Gian Francesco Malipiero as its artistic director, with the purpose of promoting Vivaldi's music and publishing new editions of his works.
A movie titled Vivaldi, a Prince in Venice was completed in 2005 as an Italian-French coproduction, under the direction of Jean-Louis Guillermou, featuring Stefano Dionisi in the title role and Michel Serrault as the bishop of Venice. Another film inspired by the life of the composer is in a preproduction state: it has the working title Vivaldi, is produced and directed by Boris Damast, and is slated to have Joseph Fiennes in the title role. Also starring are Malcolm McDowell, Jacqueline Bisset, and Gérard Depardieu.
Vivaldi's music, together with that of Mozart, Tchaikovsky and Corelli, has been included in the theories of Alfred Tomatis on the effects of music on human behaviour, and used in music therapy.
His compositions include:
As one biography describes it:[1]
The fate of the Italian composer's legacy is unique. After the Napoleonic wars, it was thought that a large part of Vivaldi's work had been irrevocably lost. However, in the autumn of 1926, after a detective-like search by researchers, 14 folios of Vivaldi's previously unknown religious and secular works were found in the library of a monastery in Piedmont. Some even and odd-numbered volumes were missing and so, the search continued. Finally, in October 1930, the missing volumes were found to be with the descendants of the Grand Duke Durazzo, who had acquired the property as early as the eighteenth century. To its amazement, the world of music was presented with 300 concerts for various instruments, 18 operas, not counting a number of arias and more than 100 vocal-instrumental pieces. Such an impressive list of newly unearthed opuses warranted a re-evaluation of Vivaldi's creativity.
Recently, four sacred vocal works by Vivaldi have been discovered in the Saxon State Library in Dresden. These compositions were improperly attributed to Baldassarre Galuppi, a Venetian composer of the early classical period, mostly famous for his choral works.
In the years 1750s or 1760s, the Saxon court asked for some sacred works by Galuppi from the Venetian copyist Don Giuseppe Baldan. Baldan included, among authentic works by Galuppi, the four compositions by Vivaldi, passing them off as Galuppi's. He probably obtained the originals from two of Vivaldi's nephews, (Carlo Vivaldi and Daniele Mauro), who worked under him as copyists.
The recognition of Vivaldi's authorship could be made by analyzing style and instrumentation and by recognizing arias from Vivaldi's operas.
The two most recent among these discoveries are two psalm settings of Nisi Dominus (RV 803, in eight movements) and Dixit Dominus (RV 807, in eleven movements), identified in 2003 and 2005, respectively, by the Australian scholar Janice Stockigt.
RV 803 was recorded for the first time in 2005 by the King's Consort under the direction of Robert King.
RV 807 was recorded for the first time in 2006 by the Dresdner Instrumental-Concert under the direction of Peter Kopp. Vivaldi scholar Michael Talbot called it "arguably the best non-operatic work from Vivaldi's pen to come to light since ...the 1920s".[2]
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Main article: List of compositions by Antonio Vivaldi |
See also: Category:Compositions by Antonio Vivaldi
Below is a list of Vivaldi works, from his many concerti to his sacred vocal works. While the list is not a complete listing of all Vivaldi works, these lists contain many known compositions, including publications during his lifetime.
Vivaldi wrote hundreds of concerti for various instruments. Below is a list of notable concerti:
Cello:
Mandolin:
Mandolin (Lute) and Orchestra:
Recorder and Flute:
Brass and Woodwind:
A possible setting, or even settings (considering the many settings of other liturgical text Vivaldi composed) of the Miserere may have existed, as hinted by the two introductory sets of movements intended for the piece(s), but such composition(s) have been lost.
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This list is a brief listing of ensembles with a speciality in Vivaldi's repertoire, including historically informed ensembles.
