We explain who Antonio Vivaldi was, what his best-known compositions are and how, after centuries of oblivion, his work was rediscovered in the 20th century.
Vivaldi was a Catholic priest and an important composer of the European Baroque.
Who was Antonio Vivaldi?
Antonio Vivaldi He was an Italian priest, musician, composer and music teacher.He is considered one of the greatest composers of the European Baroque. His more than seven hundred musical works, including concertos, operas and arias, enjoyed enormous recognition in 17th and 18th century Europe, and were celebrated by contemporary composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750).
Known as The Red Devil (“the Red Priest” in Italian), given his profession as a Catholic priest, Vivaldi He was also a violin virtuoso and one of those responsible for consolidating the concert genre in Europe., one of the most important at that time. Among his works, his series of concertos for violin and orchestra entitled The four Seasons (The four stages).
Despite his enormous success during the reign of Charles VI of Habsburg (1685-1740), Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, Vivaldi He had a tragic fate and died in poverty. Furthermore, his work was practically forgotten until its rediscovery and appreciation in the 20th century, a product of the musicological research of the Italian professor Alberto Gentili (1873-1954) and other contemporary professors.
Vivaldi’s birth and early years
Antonio Lucio Vivaldi born on March 4, 1678 in Venice, capital of the then Republic of Venice. He was the first of nine children of Camilla Calicchio and the violinist Giovanni Battista Vivaldi, who was also his first music teacher. During his childhood, father and son toured Venice together, playing the violin.
During those early years, Vivaldi made his talent clear. At the age of 10, he played with the orchestra of St. Mark’s Basilica and shortly afterward he had his first composition teacher, Giovanni Legrenzi (1626-1690), one of the most prominent composers of the early Baroque in Italy. Under his tutelage, Vivaldi At the age of 13, he composed his first liturgical work. coral.
Shortly afterward, at the age of just 15, Vivaldi entered a seminary and was ordained a priest. Although his interests were more in tune with music than with religion, Vivaldi He rose through the ranks of the order between 1693 and 1703, until he was anointed priest at the age of 25.
Since then, He devoted himself to religious music and celebrated mass only a few times. Suffering from asthma, he was never able to play wind instruments, so he devoted himself mostly to violin and composition. In those years, was nicknamed The Red Devil (in Italian “the Red Priest”), although the reason is not clear. Some versions attribute it to his red hair, while others explain it as an inheritance from his paternal artistic nickname, “Rossi.”
Vivaldi’s first compositions
Vivaldi received his priestly order in 1703 and was known as “the Red Priest.”
Beginning in 1704, Vivaldi He worked as a violin and singing teacher in the Venetian convent, hospice and orphanage called Ospedale della Pietà. Such institutions were often not only shelters for abandoned infants, but also centres for musical performance. They gave rise to musical talents such as Anna Bon di Venezia (1739-c.1767) and Agata della Pietà (1712-1769).
Vivaldi worked in this hospice for thirty years. He served as a music teacher, as a musical director and, years later, also as a supplier of compositions. During this period, He composed many of his most famous worksmany of them intended to be performed by orphans.
Through the performance of concerts, cantatas and sacred vocal pieces composed by Vivaldi, the institution gained considerable prestige in Venice and the rest of Italy. So much so that in 1705 the first compilation of his violin sonatas appeared, and in 1709 a second compilation with different works.
However, His consecration as a composer was constituted by the appearance in 1711 of The harmonic inspiration (The harmonic estro), a series of twelve concertos for various violins and string instruments, dedicated to the great Tuscan patron of the arts, Ferdinand de’ Medici (1663-1713).
These twelve concertos form the first of Vivaldi’s great musical works, and were highly appreciated by later musicians, especially by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), who years later made transcriptions of them for organ, harpsichord and strings.
Ryom Catalog
Vivaldi’s numerous works have been collected and classified on several occasions, giving rise to different catalogues. The most recent, known as the Ryom Catalog (Ryom Verzeichnis), was created by the Danish musicologist Peter Ryom (1937-) and published in 1973. Hence, the acronym RV is often used together with a specific number to identify Vivaldi’s works. For example, him Concerto No. 1 in E major, Op. 8 (known as “Spring”) is identified in this catalogue with the code “RV 269”.
The success of The harmonic inspiration It was total and projected Vivaldi’s name throughout Europe. As a result, he received visits in Venice from other musicians of the time, such as the German composer and Breslau chapelmaster, Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel (1690-1749). Likewise, he was presented to King Frederick IV of Denmark (1671-1730), to whom he later dedicated some of his works.
In 1712, Vivaldi and his father were invited to the patron saint festivities of the church of Santa Maria della Pace, in Brescia, northern Italy. There the young composer presented the first of his great sacred vocal works, Stabat Mater (RV 621), inspired by a religious poem from the 13th century in which the pain of the Virgin Mary in front of her crucified son is described.
Vivaldi’s operas
In 1713, Vivaldi presented Otón in the villagethe first of his many operas.
In May 1713, A new field opened up for Vivaldi: operawith his first work of the genre, Otto in the village (Ottone in villaRV 729). With a libretto by Domenico Lalli (1679-1741), this work premiered at the Teatro delle Grazie in the city of Vicenza, by direct commission of its governor.
After his return to Venice, Vivaldi He dedicated himself to the production of opera (impresario) at the Teatro Sant’Angelo. There his second composition of the genre was presented, fake crazy Orlando (Orlando finto pazzoRV 727), in 1714, the year in which his second set of twelve concertos also appeared: The extravagance (The stravaganza).
The following year, he presented another opera, Nero made Caesar (Nerone fatto CesareRV 724), of which no manuscript survives, and then Arsilda, Queen of Pontus (Arsilda, regina di Ponto, RV 700), whose representation was censored, because it contained a scene in which a woman fell in love with another who posed as a man. After much insistence from Vivaldi, the opera was finally presented with great success in 1716.
That same year, The Ospedale della Pietàle commissioned Vivaldi to compose a set of liturgical works, known as “oratorios”. The first was Moses Deus Pharaonis (RV 643), whose score has not survived to the present, nor have those of The naval victory (The Naval VictoryRV 782) and The adoration of the three Wise Men to the baby Jesus (The adorations of the three Re magi to the baby Gesú, RV 645), written later. However, he has survived. Juditha triumphans devicta Holofernis barbarism (RV 644), subtitled by Vivaldi as a “sacral-military oratorio” and premiered in Venice in 1716.
Juditha triumphans It was written on the occasion of the victory of the Republic of Venice and the Holy Roman Empire against the Ottoman Empire in the Austro-Turkish War of 1716-1718. Its title, translated from Latin as “Judith triumphs over the barbarity of Holofernes”, tells of the biblical episode of the death of the Assyrian general who was besieging Jerusalem, at the hands of a young Jewish woman with whom he falls in love.
In 1716, Vivaldi composed two more operas: The coronation of Darius (The Coronation of DariusRV 719) and The triumphant constancy of love and hate (The triumphant constancy of love and hatred, RV 706). The latter was particularly successful and was presented with other titles at the Teatro Sant’Angelo in 1731 and in Prague the following year.
Vivaldi’s life in Mantua
Between 1717 and 1718, Vivaldi He assumed the position of chapel master at the court of Philip of Hesse-Darmstadt (1671-1736), governor of the Italian city of Mantua, then governed by the Austrian crown. For three years, Vivaldi resided in that northern Italian city and devoted himself to writing new operas, including Titus Manlius (RV 738), written on the occasion of the marriage of the imperial governor.
In Mantua, Vivaldi also met the young opera singer Anna Girò (c.1710-18th century), with whom he had a close artistic relationship. Girò quickly became the prima donna of Vivaldi and star singer of his operas. Given her professional and personal closeness to “the Red Priest,” she was known as The Annina of the Red Father, and their relationship was the subject of much speculation. Vivaldi always denied any type of love relationship between him and the young woman.
In 1721, Vivaldi He composed the most famous of his great musical works, The four Seasons, a set of four concertos for violin and orchestra. Published in 1725 along with some poems written by Vivaldi himself, each of these concertos is dedicated to a time of the year and is in turn divided into three movements: fast (allegro either presto), slow (long either adage) and fast (allegro either presto).
The four Seasons It was an unusual work for its time, which sought to translate into musical language the sensations associated with each of the four stages of the year: “The spring” (RV 269), “The summer” (RV 315), “The autumn” (RV 293) and “The winter” (RV 297). Thus, for example, winter is described with dark and melancholic tones, while spring with happy and hopeful sounds.
That same year, Vivaldi visited Milan, where he presented his pastoral drama Silvia (RV 734) and some of his oratorios, and in 1722 he moved to Rome, where he played for Pope Benedict XIII (1649-1730). Three years later he returned to Venice, in time to compose two pieces for the French ambassador in his country: the cantata Gloria and Hymenaeus (Gloria and ImeneoRV 687), on the occasion of the wedding of King Louis XV of France (1710-1774), and the serenade The Seine on a festive day (The festive SeineRV 694), to celebrate the birth of the French princesses.
In 1727 he also composed twelve new violin concertos, titled The zither (The scepter) and dedicated to Emperor Charles VI of Habsburg (1685-1740), whom he met during a visit to Trieste in 1728. From his hands, Vivaldi He received a knighthood, a gold medal and an invitation to visit the…