The son of a baker, Antonio Vivaldi grew up in a simple
Venetian home. His father, Giovanni Battista, broke with the
family tradition and gave up baking to become a musician, and from
1685 was employed at St Mark's as a violinist.
A career in the church was an attractive escape from poverty
and Antonio began training for the priesthood at the age of 15. He
simultaneously developed his own skills on the violin and
occasionally deputized for his father at St Mark's. In 1703 betook
holy orders but after 1705, supposedly because of a chest
complaint, he no longer said Mass. (This was to cause him problems
later on when in 1737 a production of one of his operas was banned
by the papal authorities, describing the composer as a non-practising
priest who had an alleged relationship with a female singer.) Also
in 1703 Vivaldi became the Maestro di Violino at the Pio Ospedale della Pieta, an orphanage for
girls in Venice, where music played an integral part in the
curriculum. At the hospice he raised musical standards to a high
level; the regular concerts given by the hospice's orchestra,
performed behind a "modesty" screen, were extremely popular and,
according to a contemporary account, the equal of anything in
Paris. Writing in 1740, the traveller Charles de Brasses described
the orphanage girls: "They are reared at public expense and
trained solely to excel in music. And so they sing like angels
..."
For Vivaldi the appointment was a golden opportunity to develop
the concerto form and he produced a large number of works for
unusual combinations of instruments as aids to his teaching.
Having established himself as a teacher and composer with the
publication in 1711 of L'estro annonico (Harmonic
inspiration), a collection of concertos for one, two, and four
solo violins, Vivaldi also garnered a reputation as a virtuoso
violinist of great energy and daring. He became interested in
having his works published and arranged for editions to be printed
in Amsterdam to give him a professional advantage in northern
Europe. Vivaldi was quick to capitalize on his new-found fame with
a string of performances and compositions, sometimes altering the
dedication of works to flatter illustrious persons passing through
Venice. He stopped publishing music when he found it more
lucrative to sell direct to visitors.
In 1713 Vivaldi's first opera, Ottone in villa, was
performed in Vicenza. This was followed by Orlando, which opened the 1714-15 season at
Sant' Angelo, Venice, and subsequently by at least another 40
operas during his career. Around the same time Vivaldi is believed
to have composed his Gloria in D, one of a number of sacred
works by this prolific composer. Cast in nine movements, the
Gloria features solo voices and is full of contrasts in
scoring, style, mood, and key.
Vivaldi's one period of work away from Venice was between 1718
and 1720 in the employ of Prince Philip of Hess-Darmstadt at
Mantua. In the heartland of northern Italy he worked in the
extraordinary splendour of the court with its vast rooms painted
with murals, its elaborate Zodiac Hall, and Mall of Rivers.
Undoubtedly this environment, rather than the mudflats of the
Venetian basin, was the inspiration for Le quattro stagioni
(The four seasons). This famous work is part of Vivaldi's Opus
8, which appeared in 1725. Of Vivaldi's 500 concertos, more than
230 are for solo violin, and The four seasons consists of four of them. As in the Gloria,
Vivaldi's variety of technique is given free rein. The piece is an
early example of programme music (where the music tells a story or
depicts a scene). In it Vivaldi employed various instruments to
represent, for example, birdsong, a sleeping shepherd, and a
barking sheepdog.
After Vivaldi's death his work suffered a rapid decline in
popularity and for a long time he was remembered only as a
virtuoso musician. In the nineteenth century, however, German
research into J.S. Bach revealed that he had transcribed a number
of Vivaldi's works for keyboard. Interest in Vivaldi's work was
reawakened, and its rich variety and inventiveness became
appreciated; in the late twentieth century his music is even more
popular than when he was alive.
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