ANTONIO VIVALDI
Born: March 4, 1678. Venice, Italy
Died: July 28, 1741. Vienna, Austria
Italian composer of instrumental music and opera. He was important in the development of the concerto.
Visitors to Venice in the early eighteenth century often made a point of attending one of the regular concerts given by the orchestra of the Ospedale della Pietà . Here they would hear a group of girls and young women (orphans supported by the organization) playing with "all the gracefulness and precision imaginable." The concerts would spotlight various members of the orchestra (sometimes highlighting unusual combinations of instruments) and the music would often be by the leading composer of the city, Antonio Vivaldi.
Vivaldi began serving the Ospedale in 1703, soon after being ordained a priest, and he held various positions there almost all his life. An important part of his duties was to supply concertos for the orchestra; over the course of his career he composed over five hundred concertos, both for solo instruments (principally violin) and for combinations of instruments. Although Vivaldi wrote a great deal of music in other genres, including more than fifty operas, it is his concertos that have granted him a lasting place in musical history.
The concertos that Vivaldi wrote helped define the genre in the Baroque and into the Classical era. These normally comprised three movements (fast, slow, fast); the fast movement regularly employed a ritornello form. In this form, an orchestral melody alternates with the freer sections that feature the soloist or soloists. The repetition of the ritornello provides a point of reference for the listener, allowing the soloist to stand out. It also allows the composer a greater degree of freedom in how the soloist's material is treated.
Vivaldi's concertos also stand out for the degree of inventiveness that he brought to them. While challenging the player, they also engage the listener. One of his most famous groups of concertos, The Four Seasons, demonstrates this well, and shows the more dramatic and colorful potential of the genre. Each concerto represents a different season, and the music illustrates in sound a picture created by an accompanying poem. Vivaldi uses his ingenuity to take the mundane sounds of daily life (the barking of a dog, the buzzing of flies), along with more dramatic sounds (a violent spring storm), and portray them in purely musical language that stands on its own merit. These early examples of program music well deserve their place in the popular canon of classical music.