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Vivaldi

Name: Antonio Vivaldi

Achievements: Composed 94 operas and over 500 instrumental pieces.  Violin Master at the Pieta orphanage

Born: March 4, 1678; Venice, Italy

Died: July 28, 1741; Vienna, Austria

Field & Discipline: Religion; Art; Music; Composition; Violinist; Priest

Language: Italian

Father: Giovanni Battista Vivaldi

Mother: Camilla Vivaldi

Siblings: Oldest of 9 children

Spouse: None

Children: None

Education: Trained for priesthood at local churches

Major Work:

Four Seasons, L’estro Armonico

Life & Times:

Born into a humble Venetian family,  by the time Vivaldi was 16 he was already in training for the Catholic priesthood. 

Although he was ordained in 1703, his ambitions and eventual achievements lay in music.  Known as the “red priest” for his thick, curly, red hair, he could not even give mass due to an illness (now known to be severe asthma).   However, his status as a priest permitted him to take the post of violin teacher at the Pieta, a Catholic orphanage for girls.  The instrumental and vocal concerts performed by these girls were so world-renowned even visiting royalty  came to listen. 

Vivaldi had many and varied duties at the Pieta, including performing on the violin during intermissions and composing original works for performance by the girls.  This allowed him much-needed exposure of his talents, and soon he was a prominent figure in the musical circles of Venice.    

For the next eight years he struggled to make a name for himself as a composer. Although he composed many sonatas and concertos, he was still better known as a master violinist.  But in 1711  he captured the attention of the music world with the publication of L’estro Armonico, a collection of twelve concertos.  Part of its success can be attributed to the publisher, Estienne Roger,  located in Amsterdam. Roger used a superior engraving process and had a wider distribution network  than Vivaldi’s local Italian publishers.  This helped spread his name all over Europe as an influential composer whose sound was original.

Novel combinations of instruments and the resulting, wiry sound became known as the “Vivaldi style.”   All over Europe composers and musicians started to imitate him.  This was especially true in Germany where future music masters such as  [inspired] J.S. Bach* and [inspired] Telemann* studied,  transcribed,  performed and taught Vivaldi’s music.  Being a violin virtuoso, many of Vivaldi’s instrumental compositions were for the violin or similar string instruments, and demanded a superior technique.

Foreign rulers, like the French King [commissioned by] Louis XV*, commissioned him for original compositions. 

Even after he started to travel extensively around Europe,  unable to provide most of his previous duties as a music teacher, the Pieta continued to provide him with a salary in exchange for original compositions.  In this way he was under Pieta’s employ, off and on, until the year before his death.

Vivaldi was known to be preoccupied with money.  Although his instrumental music was profitable, he plunged into the potentially-lucrative but turbulent world of opera.  Some of his operas were successes, earning him money and encouraging him to continue with his passion.  Vivaldi himself said he wrote 94 operas.  Unfortunately, operas were rarely published at the time, and many are now lost.  Contemporaries, such as [met] Handel*, who also fell for the allure of opera, suffer the same fate today, having spent so much of their professional careers on work so impermanent. 

With opera as his main undertaking, Vivaldi started to travel extensively throughout Europe, to stage them.  Both the travel and the productions were expensive endeavors that required the funds of wealthy patrons, who were often noblemen and royalty.  But they in turn often demanded commercial success, an outcome uncertain for any artistic production. In addition, they often controlled the artistic direction as much as they controlled the purse. 

So the patrons and Vivaldi often clashed on creative issues.  But Vivaldi had many patrons.  In fact, his travels were dictated by the location of the patrons and their willingness to assist in staging operas.  For example, Rome attracted many musicians, such as Scarlatti and Handel, because in the mid-17th century Christina of Sweden, a music lover, moved to Rome and generated high-quality music events.  This attracted talented musicians and by the time Vivaldi traveled there, Rome was a city that loved music and celebrated musicians.  Even the Pope enjoyed concerts and on one occasion Vivaldi played the violin for him.

Prague, too, was a popular music city, with willing patrons.  Vivaldi staged a successful opera there in 1730.  After his return from Prague, he stopped publishing instrumental music altogether.  For the next decade, he continued to travel and to stage operas.  The best literary account of Vivaldi’s life comes from a famous Italian playwright and an opera collaborator, [collaborator and autobiographer was] Goldoni*.  In his autobiography, he tells lively accounts of meeting Vivaldi, who he describes as a brilliant violinist but a mediocre composer.

While Vivaldi traveled, Venice was in economic decline.  And although he intermittently returned there, he was no longer locally popular.  By 1740, his once revolutionary music had fallen out of favor with the critics and a string of failed operas made him also lose audiences and patrons in many European cities.  However he still had a long-time admirer in Emperor Charles VI.  Hoping for continued patronage from him, Vivaldi made a final journey to Vienna in 1740 at the age of 62.  Soon after his arrival, Charles VI died, and Vienna was put into turmoil.  Music and opera became low priority, and Vivaldi was stranded without a way of making a living. 

He died in Vienna in 1741, penniless, given a pauper’s funeral with an anonymous grave, his work all but forgotten.  It was not until the twentieth century that his music was rediscovered, thanks to the efforts of American poet Ezra [rediscovered by] Pound*.   To date,  Vivaldi’s Four Seasons has been recorded over a hundred times and has become one of the most recorded, performed and sold pieces of music of all time.   

Assessment: Prolific and influential composer and violinist.   

Oneliner: Antonio Vivaldi, great Italian composer

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