ANTONIO VIVALDI

A Violin Before Breakfast

I was born in Venice on 4 March 1678, and my father, Giovanni Battista, was a professional violinist at St Mark's, so music was simply part of the furniture. He taught me the violin from early childhood, and I can't remember a time without one under my chin. In 1693 I began studying for the priesthood, I was ordained in 1703, and people soon called me "il Prete Rosso", the Red Priest, because of my red hair. Saying Mass turned out to be a problem because of a tightness in my chest, usually taken to be asthma, so I was excused from it and kept the violin.

The Girls' Orchestra Gets a New Teacher

In September 1703 I was appointed maestro di violino at the Pio Ospedale della Pietà, one of four orphanages for girls in Venice. That meant I was a violin teacher, and I should be clear that my own violin training came from my father, not from the Pietà. Then in 1711 a collection of my concertos called L'estro armonico, Op. 3, was published in Amsterdam, far from the canals I knew. For a priest with a tight chest and a bright head of hair, that was a very good year.

Home Base and a Short Holiday in Mantua

Venice was my home, and the Pietà remained my base from 1703 to 1740, though I took several long leaves of absence. One of those absences took me to the court of Mantua, where I served as maestro di cappella for Prince Philip of Hesse-Darmstadt in the late 1710s. Ask three historians exactly which years I was there and you will get three different answers, so I won't pretend to settle it. What I can say is that a city of water and a court of palaces gave me two very different audiences to write for.

Four Seasons and a Lot of Concertos

I wrote around 500 concertos, and about 230 of them are for violin, which tells you where my heart was. The best known are The Four Seasons, the first four concertos of my Op. 8, Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione, published in 1725, and each one goes with a sonnet. The story goes that I may have written those sonnets myself, but nobody can say for sure. Spring begins with a bright, bouncing tune for the whole orchestra, and then the violins start to chirp like birds, as if the music itself had opened a window.

The Opera Count

I also wrote operas, and here my reputation gets a little untidy. A letter from 1737 mentions 94 of them, but nobody has ever been able to document that claim. Only about fifty have been discovered, which is still a respectable pile of paper for one man. So either I counted generously or a great many of my operas are still hiding somewhere, and I'll leave you to decide which.

A Bad Plan in Vienna

In 1727 I dedicated a collection called La cetra, Op. 9, to Emperor Charles VI, and I kept hoping that a friendly emperor might look after me. So I moved to Vienna, in 1740 or early 1741 depending on the source, hoping for imperial patronage. Charles VI died soon after I arrived, and my plan went with him. I died in Vienna on 28 July 1741, aged 63, of an internal infection, and I was buried cheaply that same day in a hospital cemetery that no longer exists.

Lost and Found, Like an Umbrella

For a while it looked as if much of my music had disappeared for good. Then in 1926 fourteen volumes of it, thought lost since the Napoleonic Wars, turned up in a monastery in Piedmont. In 1930 Alberto Gentili obtained the large collection of my manuscripts, and that is when people began to understand how important my work was. I am grateful to everyone who went looking, because I could hardly do it myself.

What I Would Like You to Take Home

I would like you to hear the music before you worry about anything else, because you don't need to know a single rule to enjoy it. Put it on while you cook, walk or sit by a window, and let the violins do what they were written to do. If you catch yourself smiling at a tune you have never heard before, then I have done my job. That is all I ever wanted from a concert, and it is all I want from you.