Le Quattro Staggioni op. 8, nos. 1-4   "The Four Seasons"
performed Dec 9, 2001

Long famous throughout Europe as a composer and violinist, Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) lost his public during the last decade of his life. He spent his final days in penury and, like Mozart after him, was buried in a pauper's grave, his scores seemingly doomed to obsurity. In fact, more than 200 years passed before musicians made the first sustained attempt of reviving the composer's works. Before the late 1940's, and even at that time, musicologists would have scoffed at the suggestion that Vivaldi could ever again attain best-seller status. Yet, by the mid-1960's, Vivaldi's music had, with storybook rapidity, regained the kind of widespread admiration and adoration it had last known in the 1720's.

The vast size of Vivaldi's concerto output, (some 500 surviving works), was a consequence of the composer's 35 years of employment at Venice's Pio Ospedale della Pietà, where new music was constantly needed for the weekly Sunday public concerts presented by the students. The Pietà originated as a shelter and school for female orphans, but soon proved of such educational excellence (particularly in music) that the wealthy citizens began sending their daughters there. Clearly, the Pietà girls were superlatively trained musicians, or so Vivaldi's concertos indicate.

Vivaldi apparently considered such student works of less importance to his career than his operas, forty-six of which survive though there may have been many more. He repeatedly took leaves of absence from the Pietà to supervise productions of his stage works in various Italian cities.

Little is known about the composition of Vivaldi's most popular work, Le Quattro Staggioni, op. 8, nos. 1-4, commonly known as The Four Seasons. Scored for solo violin with strings and continuo, each of the four concertos represents a season, and is based upon a sonet written by Vivaldi himself. The complete set of twelve concertos is given the title "A Trial of Harmony and Invention". In a miraculous foreshadowing of the program music that would dominate the Romantic era 150 years later, Vivaldi indulges in flawless tone painting to describe every line of the sonnets.