Antonio Vivaldi… So much more than changes in the weather.

The Music

The Words

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of the ‘Classical For Everyone’ Podcast… five hundred years of incredible music. My name is Peter Cudlipp and… If you enjoy any music at all then I’m convinced you can enjoy classical music. All you need are ears. No expertise is necessary. If you’ve ever been curious about classical music… or explored it for a while once upon a time… or just quietly wondered what all the fuss was about… then this is the podcast is for you. And because there’s a lot of music out there each episode has something of a theme. And for today it is… The music of Antonio Vivaldi.

Now if you have hit play for this episode then that means you are in that group of the population who have not been entirely turned off Vivaldi by the overuse of his set of violin concertos ‘The Four Seasons’ in pasta commercials, tourism videos for pretty much anywhere in Southern Europe, bank websites, elevators, airports… and a new Netflix series. So, I am very glad you are going to join me for an hour of exquisite music during which I will attempt to give you a sense of the breadth of Vivaldi’s compositional output because he wrote a truly remarkable amount of music and so much of it is really good…  I am going to play a concerto for two violins and cello, a mandolin concerto, a song from his semi-opera Andromeda liberata, a cello sonata, a section from his Stabat Mater for solo voice and small ensemble, and a concerto for violin that is all about ‘Winter’. I’ll give you some biography in a few minutes but to start here is his concerto for two violins and cello… and since the term is going to crop up a bunch of times in this week’s show… a concerto was, in Vivaldi’s day, usually a work in three sections where one, two or three solo instruments were accompanied by a smallish ensemble most importantly featuring a one or a handful of instruments that added a bass line and some chords that fleshed out the harmonies.

Here is the viola da gamba player Jordi Savall and his Concert of Nations with Antonio Vivaldi’s ‘Concerto for two violins and cello’. It is in three parts and is about 9 minutes long.

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That was the viola da gamba player Jordi Savall and his Concert of Nations with Antonio Vivaldi’s ‘Concerto for two violins and cello’.

So for the next couple of minutes I’m going to give you a quick biography of Vivaldi… He was born in the Republic of Venice in 1678, the son of a professional violinist who likely provided his early musical training. And based on the amount of… and the quality of… the music he wrote for the violin… he was very probably a phenomenal player. He was ordained as a Catholic priest in 1703, but Vivaldi's career as a cleric was short-lived. He claimed ill health (possibly asthma) prevented him from saying Mass, and his most significant professional appointment also came in 1703 when he began teaching music at the Ospedale della Pietà, one of Venice's renowned orphanages for girls.

I could let this reference to Venice’s orphanages just slide by but maybe it needs a little explanation. For centuries female babies who were unwanted for a variety of reasons… including being the children of the mistresses of the men of the ruling class were left with religious institutions for their care and upbringing. And of the four in Venice in the 1700’s the Ospedale della Pietà was the most famous and the music education of the children was one of its particular claims to fame. During his nearly four-decade association with the institution, Vivaldi composed hundreds of concertos, sacred works, and other pieces for the orphans to perform. Their concerts became famous throughout Europe, attracting distinguished visitors to Venice and establishing Vivaldi's reputation as a composer of exceptional skill and imagination. Despite his prolific output and international fame, Vivaldi faced financial difficulties throughout his career. He travelled extensively, staging operas in various Italian cities and seeking patronage from European nobility. By the late 1730s, changing musical tastes led to a decline in his popularity in Venice. In 1740, he sold many of his manuscripts to finance a journey to Vienna, where he hoped to secure an appointment at the imperial court of Charles VI, who admired his music. But Emperor Charles died shortly after Vivaldi's arrival, eliminating the composer's prospects for employment. Without income or patronage, Vivaldi died in poverty in Vienna in July 1741 at the age of 63. He was buried in a simple grave, and his music fell into obscurity for nearly two centuries.  And I will come back to how he went from essentially being an unknown to now a name that is almost universally recognised… even outside the world of classical music.

But now, some more music… Here is another concerto. This is Vivaldi’s Concerto for Mandolin. It is in three sections and is about eight minutes long. Here it is performed by the group ‘Il Giardino Armonico’ (The Garden of Harmony) directed by Giovanni Antonini.  And the mandolin is played by Duillio Galfetti.

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That was Vivaldi’s Concerto for Mandolin performed by the group ‘Il Giardino Armonico’ (The Garden of Harmony) directed by Giovanni Antonini.  And the mandolin was played by Duillio Galfetti… who in fact is better known as a violinist. Oh there is so much talent out there. I’m glad I’m not an easily jealous person.

Ok. So if Vivaldi were alive today… he might be pretty happy with the fact that a lot of his music is being played. But perhaps he would be a little wistful that of his more than 40 operas, practically none are performed today. But there is some amazing music and for this episode I’ve chosen just one nine minute piece.

And to be strictly accurate academics don’t quite consider this an opera. But the character singing is a woman who will end up transformed by a goddess into a group of stars in the night sky singing beautifully about her rescue from being chained to a cliff-face… sounds like an opera to me. The work is called ‘Andromeda Liberata’… or ‘Andromeda Set Free’. And the song I am going to play is ‘Sovente, il sole risplende in cielo’, or, In English… ‘Often the sun shines in the sky’. Anne Sofie von Otter is the singer with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe and Daniel Hope directing and he also plays the solo violin part.

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That was ‘Sovente, il sole risplende in cielo’, or, In English… ‘Often the sun shines in the sky’ from Vivaldi’s opera ‘Andromeda Set Free’. Anne Sofie von Otter was the singer with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe and Daniel Hope directed and he also played the solo violin part.

I mentioned earlier that after he died Vivaldi’s music pretty much disappeared. Which is all terribly dramatic but a few things are worth mentioning. The first of which is pretty obvious but also pretty significant. There was no recording technology. All that was left of any music of that age was the score. Notes on some pages. And of them… very, very few were printed. Some might be copied by hand but there would certainly be many, many cases, if not the majority… where a single copy might be all that existed.

That any of this music survived  at all is somewhat miraculous. Another factor was that the cultural emphasis was on new music. If you were wealthy enough to have your own orchestra or you were a bishop with a choir… then your prestige was in having new music all the time. The idea of dredging up something from a few years or a few decades earlier would only really emerge in the nineteenth century.

And then some decades later with the rise of musicology in universities and a growing middle class with a growing appetite for music people started consciously looking for ‘old’ music. The rediscovery of Vivaldi's music ranks among the most remarkable musical recoveries of the 20th century. The pivotal moment came in the late 1920s when researchers discovered an enormous collection of Vivaldi's original manuscripts in the stacks of the library of the National University of Turin.

This extraordinary find included approximately 14 volumes of previously unknown or forgotten compositions—roughly 450 works including hundreds of concertos, sacred compositions, and operas. The Turin manuscripts represented the largest single collection of Vivaldi's music in existence and included numerous autograph scores in the composer's own hand. The collection had travelled a remarkable journey, having been purchased after Vivaldi's death and eventually making its way through various European collections before arriving back in Italy unnoticed. Only to be discovered after almost 200 years.

As well as hundreds of concertos Vivaldi wrote works for just pairs and small groups of instruments most of which ended up being called sonatas. The key difference from his concertos is that in his sonatas the other instruments have a more equal voice to the named solo instrument. So in the one I am going to play you which is a cello sonata, the harpsichord, organ, guitar, lute and additional cello all have more independent lines of music… or to put it another way… there is an interplay amongst a group of melodies.  The concerto is in four parts and is about ten minutes long. Pieter Wispelwey plays the cello and the group Florilegium supplies the other instruments. Antonio Vivaldi’s 6^th Cello Sonata.

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That was Vivaldi’s 6^th Cello Sonata. Pieter Wispelwey played the cello and the group Florilegium supplied the other instruments.

As Vivaldi was a priest it is not going to be a surprise that he wrote a fair collection of devotional music. One of his best is the work known by the first two words that are sung… they are ‘Stabat Mater’. A bit of background. The Stabat Mater is a 13th-century Christian hymn to the Virgin Mary that portrays her suffering as mother because of the crucifixion of her son, Jesus Christ. The full first line of the hymn is actually "Stabat Mater dolorosa", which means "the sorrowful mother was standing". In 1712 Vivaldi took the first half of the hymn and set it to music for a solo singer and a small instrumental group. It is in 9 parts but I’m just going to play you the first three.. about 7 minutes long and as you’d imagine from the subject matter …this is music trying to portray sadness and despair and perhaps an underlying solace in religious faith. And as it is sung in Latin a listener (like me) can be forgiven for just revelling in the beauty of the music. Here is the singer Andreas Scholl with Chiara Banchini directing Ensemble 415 in Antonio Vivaldi’s ‘Stabat Mater’

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That was the singer Andreas Scholl with Chiara Banchini directing Ensemble 415 in the first three sections of Antonio Vivaldi’s ‘Stabat Mater’.

To finish, I’m going to play you a section from maybe one of the best known pieces of classical music. So well-known in fact that when people want to slag off classical music whilst showing off their slender knowledge… this is generally the piece they will roll their eyes about shake their heads at. Yes, Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. Alright… I have a favour to ask. Imagine for a moment that you are in Italy in the early 1700’s and a composer has written a brand new violin concerto where he has taken the pretty revolutionary step of trying to directly portray the words of a poem about the deep cold of winter… which begins…

Frozen and trembling in the icy snow,
In the severe blast of the horrible wind,
As we run, we constantly stamp our feet,
And our teeth chatter in the cold.

Here is ‘Winter’ from Vivaldi’s ‘The Four Seasons’. Simon Standage is the violin soloist and Trevor Pinnock leads The English Concert.

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That was ‘Winter’ from Vivaldi’s ‘The Four Seasons’. Simon Standage was the violin soloist and Trevor Pinnock led The English Concert. And if you want to learn more in depth about The Four Seasons then the podcast ‘Sticky Notes’ by the conductor Joshua Weilerstein has a great episode all about the work.

My name is Peter Cudlipp and you have been listening to the ‘Classical for Everyone’ Podcast… this episode featuring the music of Antonio Vivaldi. If you would like to listen to past episodes, of which there are more than a dozen, or get details of the music I’ve played please head to the website classicalforeveryone.net. That address again is classicalforeveryone.net. There you will also find some mini-episodes that address some of what I want to call the vexing questions for a listener new to Classical Music like… ‘Are conductors actually important?’; ‘Why does the word ‘sonata’ keep turning up?’ and ‘Why is almost everything in Italian?’. And on the individual episode pages of the website there are links to Spotify playlists with the full versions of most of the music played in each of the episodes.

If you want to make sure you don’t miss the shows as they are released then please Subscribe or Follow wherever you get your podcasts. That would also mean the search algorithms will smile more benignly on the show and it might reach a few more people. For that I would be very grateful. And if you want to get in touch then you can email… info@classicalforeveryone.net.

This podcast is made with Audacity Software for editing, Wikipedia for Research, Claude for Artificial Intelligence and Apple, Sennheiser, Sony, Rode and Logitech for hardware… The music played is licensed through AMCOS / APRA. Classical For Everyone is a production of Mending Wall Studios and began life on Radio 2BBB in Bellingen NSW, Australia thanks to the late, great Mr Jeffrey Sanders. The producers do not receive any gifts or support of any kind from any organisation or individual mentioned in the show. But, never say never.

And if you have listened to the credits… here is a little bonus for you… This is the opening chorus of Vivaldi’s Gloria. David Willcocks conducts the Choir Of King's College Cambridge and the Academy Of St. Martin In The Fields. Thanks for listening.