Musical Moments #39
“There are no words, it’s only music there.”
Antonio Vivaldi
Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) Gloria, First Movement
Antonio Vivaldi started his life as a rather sickly child, being baptized at birth because he wasn’t expected to live. He came from a family of ruffians with a brother banished from Venice for making faces and giving obscene gestures to the city’s leader, and Vivaldi would, over his lifetime, add his own share of controversies.
He was nicknamed Il prete rossa, or “the red priest,” but there was much more color to his life than just his long red hair. Vivaldi was a non-officiating priest with a highly unorthodox living arrangement—a ménage that included a singer, Anna, and her sister Paolina. The Vatican sent spies to investigate the relationship, and while he remained in his position, upon his retirement the powerful Cardinal Ruffo of Naples would not let him perform in his province due to Vivaldi’s unsanctioned relationships.
Vivaldi spent most of his career at Ospedale della Pieta which was a school for orphaned girls and young women, many of whom were offspring of mistresses to the wealthy and powerful. He organized and conducted an all-female orchestra and choir that offered weekly Sunday concerts. Their reputation for excellence was widely acknowledged, and the English music lover, Charles Burney, who traveled Europe, (listening to performances by J.S. Bach, C.P.E. Bach, Handel, and others), wrote about his 1739 visit to hear Vivaldi’s group: “The most transcendent music here (Venice) is that provided by the Ospitali. . . . They sing like angels, they play the violin, the flute, the organ, the cello, and the bassoon. In short, there is no instrument so large as to give them pause. They are cloistered, like the religious orders. They are the sole performers at each concert, and some forty of them take part. . . . music, the like which is to be found nowhere else in Italy or in all the world, which to my thought is superior.”
Vivaldi retired and eventually moved to Vienna where he hoped to secure a position with an admirer, Charles VI, but soon after his arrived the emperor died. Vivaldi spent his last year of life impoverished, living and working in the house of a saddle maker’s widow. He was buried in a simple grave owned by a hospital fund, and there was no music at his funeral.
During his lifetime, Vivaldi’s operas were popular, but after his death his music was largely ignored for two centuries until a revival in the 1930s. He is now known for his church music and the prolific number of concerti he wrote for his students. Because these pieces can be rather formulaic, the joke is that he wrote one concerto 450 times. For many, his most beloved work is The Four Seasons.
The music offered today may be his most popular choral work. The opening movement from Gloria features the Bach Festival Choir and Orchestra in a February 2010 unedited performance.
-John V. Sinclair
“Music is the vapor of art. It is to poetry what reverie is to thought, what fluid is to liquid, what the ocean of clouds is to the ocean of waves.”
Victor Hugo
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