Bundling Up for Vivaldi's Violin Concerto No. 4 in F minor, RV 297, "Winter" (The Four Seasons)
The Backstory
Violin Concerto No. 4 in F minor, RV 297
Hello, I'm Antonio Vivaldi, and this is the backstory of my Violin Concerto No. 4 in F minor, RV 297, "Winter" (The Four Seasons). Here you'll hear how much I liked the shivering of the first movement, so much that I gave it new words and reused it as an aria in three of my operas. On this site my fellow composers and I also teach you to recognize our pieces when you hear them, so why not open the Trainer today ?
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The Last Chair At The Table
I wrote "Winter" as the fourth and last of my four Seasons concertos, though it began as Violin Concerto No. 4 in F minor, RV 297. It sits in a bigger set of twelve concertos called Op. 8, and it's the fourth one in that collection. I gave the whole set the title Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione, which sets harmony, meaning musical technique, against invention, meaning imagination. You can also read the title as a test of both, and I rather liked leaving that question open.Nobody Wrote The Date On The Calendar
People often ask me exactly when I composed it, and the honest answer is that nobody knows. The Four Seasons are usually placed somewhere between 1718 and 1723, when I was working in Mantua. Some scholars, Karl Heller among them, think the concertos could be as early as 1716 or 1717, while one catalogue gives 1723 for this concerto. I never left a note on the page, so the dating stays a friendly argument.A Busy Man With Two Employers
In Mantua I served as chapel master to Prince Philip of Hesse-Darmstadt, and I stayed there for about three years. Meanwhile the Ospedale della Pietà in Venice paid me from 1718 to deliver two concertos a month. That was true even though I travelled a lot, so I was writing music on the road with a deadline that never went away. If a concerto like this one sounds full of ideas, remember that I was in the habit of producing them on schedule.The Poem Behind The Music
Each of the four concertos comes with a sonnet, a short poem of fourteen lines that describes what the music is picturing. The sonnets may have been written by me, but I'll leave that as the story goes rather than swear to it. The "Winter" poem falls into three sections, and they match the three parts of the concerto one by one. So you can follow it like a captioned picture book, with the violins doing the pictures.Three Parts, Like A Three-Course Dinner
Concertos are built in movements, which are the separate parts of a piece, a bit like the courses of a dinner that you finish one at a time before the next arrives. The first course is the Allegro non molto, which is lively and tense and set in F minor. The second is the Largo, which is slow and warm and set in E-flat major, and it's the gentle dish that lets you rest. The third is the Allegro, which returns to F minor and gets you moving again, so the whole meal goes fast, slow, fast.Off To Amsterdam
The concerto reached print in Amsterdam in 1725, when Michel-Charles Le Cène published the twelve concertos of Op. 8. That date is when it was published, not when anyone first heard it, and the dedication suggests the pieces had been circulating earlier. I dedicated the set to Wenceslas, Count of Morzin, an adviser to Emperor Charles VI. As for the very first performance, nobody has found a record of when or where it happened.Who Is Actually Playing
The forces are modest: a solo violin, a string orchestra, and a basso continuo. The continuo is the quiet backbone of the group, playing the bass line and filling in the harmony underneath everyone else. That means there are no flutes, no trumpets and no drums in a piece about snow and wind. Strings alone are enough, because the sharp, bright sound of bows on strings already feels a lot like cold air.Recycling Before It Was Fashionable
I was never shy about using a good idea twice, and the first movement is a fine example. I turned it into an aria called "Gelido in ogni vena" for my opera Siroe in 1727. I used it again in Argippo in 1730 and once more in Farnace in 1731. A tune about shivering in every vein works just as well when a singer is the one trembling.A Long Wait For Applause
I died in Vienna in July 1741, aged 63 and poor, and my music slipped out of fashion for a long time. It took until 1947 for Louis Kaufman's American recording of The Four Seasons to help bring my music back in Europe and America. By then I had been gone for more than two hundred years, which is a slow way to be rediscovered. Still, I'm glad the music was patient and waited for people to pick it up again.Still Going Strong
In 1989 Nigel Kennedy recorded The Four Seasons, and it sold over three million copies. In 2012 Max Richter and the violinist Daniel Hope made Recomposed, which throws away about 75 percent of my original material and builds something new from the rest. My Largo has also found its way into other settings, including a Celtic Woman version and a choral arrangement by Accentus. It's a good feeling to know that a few minutes of winter I wrote so long ago still keep people company.---
I hope you enjoyed learning about the backstory of my Violin Concerto No. 4 in F minor, RV 297, "Winter" (The Four Seasons). Looking back, it still amazes me how a piece of about nine minutes can hold a whole season, from the first shiver to the last careful step on the ice. I've always liked that you can come back to it on a different day and notice something you missed before, whether it's a trill in the opening or the quiet rain in the Largo. There's still plenty more to explore about this concerto, from the way the music follows the sonnet to the many ways other musicians have played it and reshaped it since my time. If you're curious, please click on the links provided and keep exploring. I'd love for you to listen once more with fresh ears, and perhaps on a cold evening, when winter is right outside your window.