Antonio Vivaldi was an Italian 17-18th-century Baroque composer, virtuoso violinist, educator, priest, who’s become one of the most renowned figures in classical music, and whose influence was widespread across Europe. He composed many instrumental concertos, for the violin and a variety of other instruments, as well as sacred choral works and more than forty operas. His best-known work is a series of violin concertos known as the Four Seasons.
Background
Antonio Lucio Vivaldi was born on March 4, 1678, in Venice, Italy. His father was Giovanni Battista Vivaldi, a barber by profession and also a violinist who used to play at the San Marco basilica orchestra. He was also a co-founder of an association of musicians known as ‘Sovvegnodei musicisti di Santa Cecilia’ whose president was Giovanni Legrenzi, a veteran Baroque composer. His mother was Camilla Calicchio. Antonio Vivaldi had eight younger siblings named Iseppo (Giuseppe) Santo, Iseppo (Giuseppe) Gateno, Bonaventura Tomaso, Margarita Gabriela, Cecilia Maria, Gerolama Michela, Francesco Gaetano, and Zanetta Anna.
Through his father, Vivaldi met and learned from some of the finest musicians and composers in Venice at the time. While his violin practice flourished, chronic shortness of breath barred him from mastering wind instruments.
Education
Despite his health problems, Antonio Vivaldi studied composing and taking part in musical activities, although his asthma did stop him from playing wind instruments. His first teacher was his father himself from whom he learned to play the violin from a very early age and accompanied him to give performances at different functions in Venice. By the age of 24, Vivaldi had acquired a great deal of knowledge and expertise in playing the violin.
However, as his parents did not earn much and the family was big, Antonio chose to become a priest as it would enable him to get a good education free of cost. In 1693, at the age of 15, Vivaldi started to study to become a priest and got ordained as a priest when he was 25 years old in the year 1703.
Career
Vivaldi made his first known public appearance playing alongside his father in the basilica as a “supernumerary” violinist in 1696. He became an excellent violinist, and in 1703, he was appointed violin master at the Ospedale della Pietà, a home for foundlings. The Pietà specialized in the musical training of its female wards, and those with musical aptitude were assigned to its excellent choir and orchestra, whose much-praised performances assisted the institution’s quest for donations and legacies. Vivaldi had dealings with the Pietà for most of his career: as violin master, director of instrumental music, and paid external supplier of compositions.
Vivaldi sought religious training as well as musical instruction. Soon after his ordination as a priest in 1703, Vivaldi gave up celebrating mass because of a chronic ailment that is believed to have been bronchial asthma. Despite this circumstance, he took his status as a secular priest seriously and even earned the reputation of a religious bigot.
Vivaldi’s earliest musical compositions date from his first years at the Pietà. Printed collections of his trio sonatas and violin sonatas respectively appeared in 1705 and 1709, and in 1711 his first and most influential set of concerti for violin and string orchestra (Opus 3, L’estro armonico) was published by the Amsterdam music-publishing firm of Estienne Roger. In the years up to 1719, Roger published three more collections of his concerti (opuses 4, 6, and 7) and one collection of sonatas (Opus 5).
Vivaldi stared his career as an opera composer with his first opera named Ottone in villa which was performed at the Garzerie Theatre in Vicenza in 1713. During that time, the Pietà’s choirmaster left his post and the institution had to turn to Vivaldi and other composers for new compositions. He achieved great success with his sacred vocal music, for which he later received commissions from other institutions.
Returning to Venice, Vivaldi immediately plunged into operatic activity in the twin roles of composer and impresario. From 1718 to 1720, he worked in Mantua as director of secular music for that city’s governor, Prince Philip of Hesse-Darmstadt. This was the only full-time post-Vivaldi ever held; he seems to have preferred life as a freelance composer for the flexibility and entrepreneurial opportunities it offered. Vivaldi’s major compositions in Mantua were operas, though he also composed cantatas and instrumental works.
The 1720s were the zenith of Vivaldi’s career. Based once more in Venice, but frequently travelling elsewhere, he supplied instrumental music to patrons and customers throughout Europe. Between 1725 and 1729 he entrusted five new collections of concerti (opuses 8–12) to Roger’s publisher successor, Michel-Charles Le Cène. After 1729 Vivaldi stopped publishing his works, finding it more profitable to sell them in manuscript to individual purchasers. During this decade he also received numerous commissions for operas and resumed his activity as an impresario in Venice and other Italian cities.
In 1726 the contralto Anna Girò sang for the first time in a Vivaldi opera. Born in Mantua about 1711, she had gone to Venice to further her career as a singer. Her voice was not strong, but she was attractive and acted well. She became part of Vivaldi’s entourage and the indispensable prima donna of his subsequent operas, causing gossip to circulate that she was Vivaldi’s mistress. After Vivaldi’s death, she continued to perform successfully in opera until quitting the stage in 1748 to marry a nobleman.
In the 1730s Vivaldi’s career gradually declined. The French traveller Charles de Brosses reported in 1739 with regret that his music was no longer fashionable. Eclipsed by younger composers and more modern styles, Vivaldi left Venice for Vienna, Austria, possibly hoping to find a position in the imperial court located there. He found himself without a prominent patron following the death of Charles VI, however, and died in poverty in Vienna on July 28, 1741. He was buried in a simple grave after a funeral service that proceeded without music.
During his lifetime, Vivaldi was popular in many countries throughout Europe, including France, but after his death, his popularity dwindled. After the end of the Baroque period, Vivaldi's published concerti became relatively unknown and were largely ignored. Even his most famous work, The Four Seasons, was unknown in its original edition during the Classical and Romantic periods. Musicians and scholars revived Vivaldi's music only in the early 20th century, during which time many of the composer's unknown works were recovered from obscurity. Alfredo Casella, a composer and pianist, organized the Vivaldi Week revival in 1939. The music of Vivaldi has been performed widely since World War II. The choral composition Gloria, re-introduced to the public at Casella's Vivaldi Week, is particularly famous and is performed regularly at Christmas celebrations worldwide.
Achievements
Antonio Vivaldi was a 17th and 18th-century composer who’s become one of the most renowned figures in European classical music. He was extraordinarily prolific, producing over five hundred concertos for almost every combination of instruments, solo and trio sonatas, instrumental sinfonias, and an impressive body of sacred music, including oratorios, masses and motets. Twenty-one of his operas have survived, at least in part, although their full artistic and dramatic power has yet to be evaluated.
Vivaldi was particularly famous for composing the highly popular ‘The Four Seasons’ concertos played on the violin, a classic piece that is currently played the most among his compositions. It also must be mentioned, that Vivaldi's work, including nearly 500 concertos, have influenced subsequent composers, including Johann Sebastian Bach.
In 1728, Antonio Lucio Vivaldi received a knighthood and a gold medal from Emperor Charles VI of Austria for his Baroque compositions.
The Mercury crater was named in his honour.
The movie Vivaldi, a Prince in Venice was completed in 2005 as an Italian-French co-production under the direction of Jean-Louis Guillermou. In 2005, ABC Radio National commissioned a radio play about Vivaldi, which was written by Sean Riley. Entitled The Angel and the Red Priest, the play was later adapted for the stage and was performed at the Adelaide Festival of the Arts.
Classical Kids Music Education produces live theatre productions and has issued a CD entitled Vivaldi's Ring of Mystery.
Janice Jordan Shefelman wrote a children's book detailing the life of Vivaldi entitled I, Vivaldi.
Antonio Vivaldi was baptized immediately after his birth at his home by the midwife, which led to a belief that his life was somehow in danger. Though the reasons for the child's immediate baptism are not known for certain, it was done most likely due either to his poor health or to an earthquake that shook the city that day.
Antonio was ordained in 1703, aged 25, at Roman Catholic Church. However, not long after his ordination, in 1704, he was given a dispensation from celebrating Mass because of his ill health. He then stopped going to the Mass but never gave up his priesthood, to the extent that by old age, Ernst Ludwig Gerber (writing in 1792) considered him extraordinarily bigoted.
Views
Vivaldi's music was innovative. His highly distinctive and recognizable musical style had a profound impact on his contemporaries and future composers such as Giuseppe Tartini. His greatest influence was in the development of the concerto. Vivaldi has been credited with inventing or at least regularizing "ritornello form," usually employed in fast movements, in which a "refrain" played by the full ensemble alternates with freer, modulatory episodes played by the solo instruments. His deft coordination of melody and harmony was much admired by Johann Sebastian Bach, who absorbed Italian style through his study and transcription of Vivaldi's concertos and trio-sonatas; this influence is particularly apparent in Bach's Brandenburg Concertos.
Other distinctive elements of Vivaldi's style include a fluid alternation of major and minor tonalities, highly progressive use of dissonance and rich harmonies, and an innate melodic gift, particularly in slow movements. His vocal music has been criticized for perfunctory text-setting and violinistic vocal writing, but there are examples of great skill and inspiration in this genre, such as his Gloria or Magnificat, and his virtuosic and highly expressive motets for solo voice. Vivaldi was unquestionably a master orchestrator who explored the idiomatic potential of the many instruments for which he wrote. The Four Seasons, for example, not only illustrates his skill in writing for the virtuoso violinist but also his ability to depict extramusical or programmatic ideas in a manner that anticipates the Romantic era.
Quotations:
"Human feelings are difficult to predict."
"If you don’t like this, I’ll stop writing music."
"I’m a coward. I succumbed to jealousy and now it eats my heart."
"There are no words, it’s only music there."
"Springtime is upon us. The birds celebrate her return with festive song, and murmuring streams are softly caressed by the breezes. Thunderstorms, those heralds of Spring, roar, casting their dark mantle over heaven, Then they die away to silence, and the birds take up their charming songs once more."
"I have not now said mass for twenty-five years, and I shall never do so again, not because of a veto or a command, as His Eminence can confirm, but of my own accord, and this on account of an ailment I have suffered from since birth, which oppresses me greatly."
Personality
Antonio Vivaldi's personality can be compared to the likes of Donald Trump. During his career, he often claimed he could compose a concerto in all its parts faster than it could be copied. Many of his claims, however, could not be proved.
Physical Characteristics:
When Antonio Lucio Vivaldi was ordained to become a priest he started to be called ‘il Prete Rosso’ or the ‘Red Priest’ because of his red hair. He also battled bronchial asthma throughout his life.
Quotes from others about the person
"I found a brief piece of by Antonio Vivaldi around this time which became my ‘Pinhead Mood Music’. Called Al Santo Sepolcro (At The Holy Sepulchre), it opens more like a piece of modern orchestral music, and although it moves toward Vivaldi’s familiar harmonies, there is always the threat that it will fall back into dissonance. The piece progresses in exquisite agony, poised on a knife-edge between beauty and disfigurement, joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain. Perfect." - Doug Bradley
"Are you interested in the current revival of eighteenth-century Italian masters?" - Robert Craft
"I remember being in high school and listening to Vivaldi's 'Winter' and being so overwhelmed with emotion." - Sara Zarr
"Vivaldi is greatly overrated - a dull fellow who could compose the same form so many times over." - Igor Stravinsky
Connections
During his lifetime, Antonio Vivaldi was never married.
At the age of 48, Vivaldi, however, met 17-year old soprano Anna Tessieri Giro in Mantua who accompanied him on his tours across Europe with her half-sister Paolina. Though Antonio insisted that there was no romantic involvement between them, there were several speculations about a romantic relationship.
