Vivaldi9/22/2023 ![]() ![]() It had not escaped his father’s attention, however, that Antonio was a sensationally gifted violinist. In his teens, Antonio began preparing for the priesthood, one of the few career options open to him. ( Inside the decadence of Casanova’s Venice.) He grew up a social outsider his mother was a tailor’s daughter, and his father, while recognized as an eminent violinist in the orchestra of St. From the cradle, he suffered from a lung ailment, “a tight chest,” as he described it, likely to have been bronchial asthma. The Red Priestīorn in Venice in 1678, Antonio Lucio Vivaldi’s life was marked from the outset by poor health. He died a pauper, and his name and his music slipped into obscurity-only to be resurrected centuries later. Before he died in 1741, Vivaldi’s music had fallen out of favor, and he descended into poverty. Written for instruments like the harpsichord and violin, baroque sound is characterized by complex harmonies and passionate melodies that allow soloists the chance to fully display the range of their talents. (How Beethoven went from Napoleon’s biggest fan to his worst critic.)ĭerived from the Portuguese word for “flawed pearl,” the term baroque was, at first, an insult for this new style of music before it became popular. Like his contemporaries Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel, Vivaldi was a shining light of baroque music. His restless genius produced more than 40 operas and hundreds of concertos performed throughout Europe. Vivaldi was famous, lionized across Italy, Germany, France, and England as a virtuoso violinist and composer. And they evoke the whole compass of existence, from the beauty of nature to great Moghuls from the East.Please be respectful of copyright. But the vast majority are for his own instrument, the violin. For example, Vivaldi was the first composer to treat the cello as a serious solo instrument. These concertos champion all sorts of instruments. They were a great influence on music all over Europe. They’re dazzling to listen to and performers relish them. He brought drama, excitement and a sense of story to them. But his real legacy are his 500 or so instrumental concertos, and maybe it’s Vivaldi’s prowess as an opera composer that is the secret to how affecting they are. Doesn’t that change how you feel about him?Īs a priest, Vivaldi wrote many religious works, and during his life, he was best known as a composer of operas, not instrumental works. But Vivaldi, he was teacher, and a great number of his compositions were for his students in an orphanage. ![]() ![]() Secondly, Vivaldi lived in an age when music was written either for the Church, or for noblemen and royalty. He’s known as the Red Priest, on account of his hair, which was, well, red. In fact it was touch and go when he was a baby, so much so that when he pulled through, his mother pledged that he would become a priest, and he did. There are two important pieces of information about Vivaldi, which I feel you should know.įirstly, he suffered from poor health his whole life - we think it was probably chronic asthma. There’s a lot to this composer that is easily missed to our modern ears. In fact, people who aren’t fans of his describe his music as being "cookie-cutter" or "samey." There’s even the joke that he composed just one concerto, 500 times!īut I want to make a case for Vivaldi as being much more than a purveyor of fluffy concertos. If music was a numbers game, this composer would be the undisputed greatest. ![]()
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