A musical maverick
Vivaldi, a priest who shocked society by living with two sisters, made music that broke the mould
ANTONIO VIVALDI BORN 4 March 1678, Venice DIED 28 July 1741, Vienna His Four Seasons is now so ubiquitous as muzak in lifts, when you are on hold to call centres and in television adverts and films, that it is difficult to imagine a time when the music of Vivaldi was not popular. But he fell out of favour to such an extent after he died in 1741 that his music was almost never played until the middle of the 20th century. He’s so well known for The Four
Seasons that it’s hard to remember Vivaldi composed more than 500 concertos and 50 operas.
Vivaldi was a great violinist and a prodigious and groundbreaking composer, a maverick whose music deserves to be appreciated as more than just background wallpaper.
He was born the eldest son in a poor family in Venice, the maritime republic whose glory days as a superpower were behind it. The only job available to someone of his standing, and with a modicum of intelligence, was the priesthood. So, aged 15, he started his training and became known as ‘the red priest’ because of his hair colour.
He was ordained in 1703. In those days, being a musician and a priest was not unusual. What was odd was that Vivaldi rarely said Mass, claiming he had ‘tightness of the chest’, perhaps a severe form of asthma meaning he could not speak loudly enough to lead a service. Was this a wily ruse to spend more time composing? Very possibly.
His job, apart from priestly duties, was to teach violin to the girls of La Pietà – in theory it was a school for orphans and foundlings (babies abandoned by their mothers); in practice it educated mostly the illegitimate daughters of the nobility. There are all sorts of juicy rumours about Vivaldi getting too intimate with his young charges. These are almost certainly untrue.
What is certain is that he had a very unusual household arrangement. For 14 years he lived with the unmarried Anna Girò, a singer and former pupil, and her half-sister Paolina. Many writers have relished the thought of his being involved in a ménage à trois. And in his lifetime, the arrangement raised more than a few eyebrows.
In 1738 Vivaldi was refused entrance to the city of Ferrara where his opera
Farnace was to be performed. The city’s cardinal was making a point – his disapproval of a priest involved in the frivolities of the operatic world and living under the same roof as a female singer. Vivaldi consistently denied any wrongdoing, saying the sisters were his carers because of his health, and Paolina was Anna’s chaperone. This is probably true, but he certainly had a close relationship with Anna. In opera after opera, he wrote roles for her. And when he went on tour, the sisters went too. Venice had pioneered the idea of opera as a commercial form of entertainment. Being a republic with a taste for trade, the city allowed aristocrats and gondoliers to enjoy the operas alongside each other in the same auditorium –
something unheard of in most of the rest of Europe. Vivaldi reckoned operas were his strongest suit, and his main ones include Orlando Furioso, Orlando Finto Pazzo and L’Olimpiade. He was also an impresario, recruiting singers and set designers in a bid to ensure he got more of the profits.
In 1718, after falling out with the governors of La Pietà – something that happened on a fairly regular basis – he became musical director at the court of Prince Philip of Hesse-Darmstadt, governor of Mantua. It was here, around 1721, that he wrote his group of four concertos: The Four Seasons. Concertos were an established Italian form of music. The idea was that a single instrument was played alongside a group of other instruments, with the single instrument sometimes ‘bouncing off’ or playing ‘in opposition’ to the other group. Vivaldi’s concertos were so unusual because of his often radical groupings of instruments, using bassoons, or four individual violins, for instance.
He also wrote some of the first ‘programme music’, where music is used instead of words to depict a scene. The Four Seasons were based on sonnets he had written, and he took pains to relate his music to the texts of his poems. For example, in the Spring concerto, where the goatherd sleeps, Vivaldi uses a viola for the sound of his barking dog.
Though Vivaldi often travelled to see his operas or concertos performed, it is unclear why he went to Vienna in 1740. By then, his music had fallen out of favour and it is possible he was looking for a position at the Viennese court. He died there in 1741 aged 63, with little money, and was buried in a plain grave. Most of his manuscripts, having been sold off, were left forgotten in libraries. It was only in 1926 when an Italian school, which owned a collection of his music, sold them off that his work came to light. Since then, scholars have unearthed score after score of Vivaldi’s music.