A Fling with Vivaldi's Spring
The Backstory
Le quattro stagioni, Op. 8: Concerto No. 1 in E major, RV 269 ("La primavera")
I'm Vivaldi, and I'm glad to welcome you to the backstory of Spring (Four Seasons). You'll learn how Spring came with its own sonnets, and how the printed score points to the passages that match each line of those poems. Come and test yourself in the Trainer , where my fellow composers and I teach you to recognize our pieces as soon as they begin.
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One Concerto Out Of Twelve
Spring is the first of the four concertos that people now call The Four Seasons, but they first appeared as part of a much bigger set. That set is Op. 8, twelve concertos in all, so the four seasons share the book with eight others. It carries the title Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione, which means "The contest between harmony and invention". Spring opens the whole collection as Concerto No. 1 in E major, which seems to me a cheerful way to begin a book.A Count, A Printer And A Trip To Amsterdam
The set went to print in 1725 in Amsterdam, where Estienne Roger issued the scores. The collection carries a dedication to a Bohemian patron, Count Wenzel von Morzin. A dedication like that was a graceful way of saying thank you to someone who had supported a musician. So a piece full of meadows and birdsong traveled out into the world with a count's name printed on the front.Nobody Wrote The Date On The Calendar
You will often read that I composed these concertos around 1718 to 1720, when I was court chapel master in Mantua. Other notes suggest they may be older, perhaps by a decade or more before they were printed. Whether I wrote them in Mantua at all is something nobody can say for certain. The one date I can give you without any doubt is 1725, the year they appeared in print.Poems With Music Attached
Alongside the concertos, I published sonnets, which are short poems describing what each season is up to. Each sonnet is divided into three sections, one for each part of its concerto. Who wrote those poems is disputed, and some people think it was me, though nobody has ever proven it. The poem for Spring begins by telling you that springtime is upon us, which is hard to argue with.Directions For Use, Printed On The Page
The printed scores are marked to show which passages stand for which lines of the sonnet. A player can look at a few bars and know whether they are meant to be a breeze, a bird or a rumble in the sky. Across the four concertos I painted flowing creeks, singing birds, storms, drunken dancers, hunting scenes and frozen landscapes. In Spring the pictures are mostly meadows, birdsong and a little weather.Three Courses, One Meal
A concerto is divided into movements, and you can think of them as the courses of a meal: each one has its own pace and flavor, yet they all belong to the same dinner. In Spring the first course is the Allegro in E major, quick and bright, where the birds and the storm live. The second is the Largo e pianissimo sempre in C-sharp minor, a slow and very quiet pause in the middle for a sleeping goatherd and his faithful dog. The third is the Allegro pastorale, back in E major, a country dance in which violas, cellos and basses hold a long drone like a bagpipe while nymphs and shepherds dance beneath the spring sky.Borrowing From My Own Opera
The first movement borrows patterns from my opera Il Giustino. Ideas that had worked on the stage found a second life in the concert hall. That made sense to me, because opera is all about telling a story, and this concerto follows a poem. Birds and thunder are a kind of drama too, after all.One Soloist And A Crowd
Spring is written for a solo violin, strings and continuo. The continuo is the foundation underneath everything, a bass line with chords filling in around it. The soloist steps out of the group to show off, then slips back in, and that is where the contest in the title comes alive. Think of one confident voice in a conversation that the rest of the room keeps answering.Fame Took Its Time
Spring did not become the favorite it is today overnight. Its popularity grew through recordings in the 1940s and 1950s, including those by Molinari and Kaufman. Since 1939 about 1,000 recordings have been made, so almost every violinist has had a go at making a bird chirp. That is not a bad result for a piece that waited quite a while to become famous.New Words For Old Poems
In 2019 Armand D'Angour published a new English translation of the sonnets. A fresh translation gives today's listeners an easy way to follow the pictures in the music. When you read the lines while you listen, the birds, the sleeping goatherd and the dancers become much easier to spot. That is how I hope you hear Spring: with a poem in one hand and your ears wide open.---
So that's the story behind Spring (Four Seasons), from a book of twelve concertos to a piece that people still play every year when the weather turns warm. Did you enjoy learning about the backstory of Spring (Four Seasons)? I hope it made you curious to hear the music again, now that you know a little about the birds, the sleeping goatherd and the dancing shepherds hidden inside it. There is still a lot left to explore. The sonnets that go with the concertos have a mystery of their own, because nobody knows for certain who wrote them, and some people think it may have been me. The printed scores also show which passages belong to which lines of the poetry, so you can follow the story almost word by word as you listen. It's also worth looking at how the piece found its audience in the twentieth century, and how about 1,000 recordings have been made since 1939, each with its own idea of how spring should sound. If you'd like to go further, please click on the links provided and keep exploring Spring (Four Seasons). I'd be glad to have you listening along.