SEASONS

Composed 1716-17, by Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741).

The history of Antonio Vivaldi is almost palindromic, with his death in the middle: early glory – later neglect – death – continuing neglect – and now, renewed glory. From 1703 until 1740 (nearly his entire creative life) Vivaldi was employed as Master of Violin at Venice’s Pio Ospedale della Pietà, the Devout Hospital of Mercy, a refuge for poor and orphaned girls. Here, in addition to gaining renown as a violinist, he composed prolifically: over 500 concertos, some 46 operas, and many other works. (He allegedly claimed that he could compose a piece of music faster than a copyist could copy it.) The 12 concertos of L’estro Armonico, published in 1711, made Vivaldi famous across Europe, influencing, among others, J.S. Bach, who transcribed six of them. But music was rapidly changing during this period, and by 1740 Vivaldi was all but forgotten. He moved to Vienna to work for Charles VI, an old friend who’d become Emperor of Austria. But Charles died that year, nobody else wanted to hire Vivaldi, and he died, stranded in Vienna, the next year. For the next 200 years, Vivaldi was little more than a name in music history books.

Obviously, that is no longer the case! Today, Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons is ubiquitous – few of us can even recall the first time we heard it – but it’s a relatively late entry into the canon. Although it may have been broadcast as early as 1939, it was virtually unknown before the release of a recording made in late 1947 by violinist Louis Kaufman. A trickle of recordings and performances in the 1950s became the deluge that continues today.

A set of sonnets accompanies the concertos. (The unknown author may have been Vivaldi.) They are key to a full understanding of the concertos, because, in addition to being fully comprehensible simply as absolute music, these concertos are also program music, illustrating the sonnets’ imagery. For instance, in the first movement of Spring, the cheerful opening represents the poem’s opening line, “Spring has come and with it gaiety”; the trills heard beginning in bar 13 illustrate the second line, “The birds salute it with joyous song”; the slurred 16th notes at bar 31 illustrate the third line, “And the brooks, caressed by Zephyr’s breath, flow meanwhile with sweet murmurings”; the repeated notes at bar 44 illustrate the lines, “The sky is covered with dark clouds, announced by lightning and thunder”; and the more subdued passage beginning bar 59, with its hopeful chromatic rise, illustrates the lines, “But when they are silenced, the little birds return to fill the air with their song.” All four concertos illustrate their respective sonnets in this way.

This could easily lapse into sonic incoherence, as program music often does – earlier program music, such as Heinrich Biber’s extravagantly imaginative Battalia (1673), is often a disconnected series of aural illustrations. But Vivaldi keeps control of things through the then-recently-invented concerto form, a way of creating large-scale structural coherence while allowing for great variety of mood and texture. Recurring themes in the entire string orchestra provide each movement with the necessary unity, while modulations to closely-related keys help provide variety. The Four Seasons isn’t the first piece of program music, or even a particularly early one, but it’s the earliest piece of program music that’s widely known.

Vivaldi is sometimes criticized for the relative simplicity of his textures and ideas when measured against Bach, Handel, or even Rameau. But on his own terms, Vivaldi is a very good composer: His works feature natural and elegant melodies, clear harmonic structures, and idiomatic string writing. It’s easy to see why a composer even of Bach’s stature admired him.

Note by Mark Arnest.

Composed 1999, by Mark O’Connor (b. 1961)

Vivaldi’s set of concertos may have been the first musical exploration of the seasons, but it wasn’t the last. The best known are Haydn’s masterful oratorio, a set of piano pieces by Tchaikovsky, and a ballet by Alexander Glazunov; but there are many others.

One of the more recent ones is Mark O’Connor’s The American Seasons. O’Connor’s remarkable career spans several decades and several genres. Before he turned 23, he had won the National Oldtime Fiddlers’ Contest four times, and he could have prospered in the world of pure bluegrass music for as long as he wanted. But O’Connor has ventured far afield, to the worlds of classical music and jazz – though his music is always nourished by his bluegrass roots. He’s been remarkably productive, averaging about an album a year since his first recording in 1974. As a composer he’s concentrated on string writing, and two of his violin concertos – this one and his 1995 Fiddle Concerto – are among the most performed contemporary violin concertos.

The American Seasons contains sideways glances at Vivaldi’s set – as if O’Connor had some of Vivaldi’s themes in mind, but transformed them through improvisation – but it has a closer connection to Shakespeare’s famous soliloquy on the ages of man, from Act Two of As You Like It. O’Connor likens the seasons of a year to the stages of a person’s life.

Of the cheerful first movement, Spring, he writes that it “introduces the ideas of birth and infancy.” A violin cadenza moves through all the major keys, and its 13/8 time signature represents the Golden Ratio beloved by the Greeks. “These elements recall birth with all the possibilities a new life offers. Ending the movement, the principal theme is repeated with more complexity, as if posing life’s questions.”

He writes of Summer that it “represents the excitement and bravado of youthful adolescence and young adulthood.” The “happy-go-lucky Blues voice” moves into swing, which O’Connor calls “a common thread that runs through Ragtime through Rock and Roll on to Rap. Swing means testing the waters and pushing the envelope.”

The brief slow movement, Fall, owes less to bluegrass than the other movements. O’Connor says it symbolizes “the wisdom of maturity. It is a peaceful theme with nostalgic strokes. It is a time for sincere reflection and enjoying one’s accomplishments in life.”

Winter is the concerto’s largest and most ambitious movement. It “embodies the complexities and knowledge of an older person and that of a dying person,” writes O’Connor. “The movement begins with the principal theme from Spring, but with a dissonance that emanates from a lifetime full of emotions and responsibilities.”

The middle section is inspired by O’Connor’s Irish ancestry, as it weaves several themes together to create “a unique insight to life’s consequences from a historical perspective.” The textures here get quite dense, but are always lucid. A violin cadenza represents the soul’s departure, after which life continues in a new form – “Life’s four seasons in perpetuity.”

Note by Mark Arnest