Antonio Vivaldi (1678 - 1741)
Concerto in F Major for Flute, Strings & Basso Continuo, RV 434
Concerto in A Minor for Flute & Strings, RV 108
Concerto in C Major for Two Flutes, Strings & Basso Continuo, RV
533
Concerto in C Major for Flautino, Strings & Basso Continuo, RV 443
Concerto in C Major for Flautino, Strings & Basso Continuo, RV 444
Concerto in A Minor for Flautino, Strings & Basso Continuo, RV 445
Once virtually forgotten, Antonio Vivaldi now enjoys a reputation that
equals the international fame he enjoyed in his heyday. Born in Venice in 1678,
the son of a barber who was himself to win distinction as a violinist in the
service of the great Gabrielis and Monteverdi at the basilica of San Marco, he
studied for the priesthood and was ordained in 1703. At the same time he
established himself as a violinist of remarkable ability. A later visitor to
Venice described his playing in the opera-house in 1715, his use of high
positions so that his fingers almost touched the bridge of the violin, leaving
little room for the bow, and his contrapuntal cadenza, a fugue played at great
speed. The experience, the observer added, was too artificial to be enjoyable.
Nevertheless Vivaldi was among the most famous virtuosi of the day, as well as
being a prolific composer of music that won wide favour at home and abroad and
exercised a far-reaching influence on the music of others.
For much of his life Vivaldi was intermittently associated with the
Ospedale della Pietà, one of the four famous foundations in Venice for the
education of orphan, illegitimate or indigent girls, a select group of whom
were trained as musicians. Venice attracted, then as now, many foreign
tourists, and the Pietà and its music long remained a centre of cultural
pilgrimage. In 1703, the year of his ordination, Vivaldi, known as il prete
rosso, the red priest, from the inherited colour of his hair, was appointed
violin-master of the pupils of the Pietà. The position was subject to annual
renewal by the board of governors, whose voting was not invariably in Vivaldi's
favour, particularly as his reputation and consequent obligations outside the
orphanage increased. In 1709 he briefly left the Pietà, to be reinstated in
1711. In 1716 he was again removed, to be given, a month later, the title
Maestro de' Concerti, director of instrumental music. A year later he left the
Pietà for a period of three years spent in Mantua as Maestro di Cappella da
Camera to Prince Philip of Hesse-Darmstadt, the German nobleman appointed by
the Emperor in Vienna to govern the city.
By 1720 Vivaldi was again in Venice and in 1723 the relationship with
the Pietà was resumed, apparently on a less formal basis. Vivaldi was
commissioned to write two new concertos a month, and to rehearse and direct the
performance of some of them. The arrangement allowed him to travel and he spent
some time in Rome, and indirectly sought possible appointment in Paris through dedicating
compositions to Louis XV, although there was no practical result. Vienna seemed
to offer more, with the good will of Charles VI, whose inopportune death, when
Vivaldi attempted in old age to find employment there, must have proved a very
considerable disappointment.
In 1730 Vivaldi visited Bohemia; in 1735 he was appointed again to the
position of Maestro de' Concerti at the Pietà and in 1738 he appeared in
Amsterdam, where he led the orchestra at the centenary of the Schouwburg
Theatre. By 1740, however, Venice had begun to grow tired of Vivaldi, and
shortly after the performance of concertos specially written as part of a
serenata for the entertainment of the young Prince Friedrich Christian of
Saxony his impending departure was announced to the governors of the Pietà, who
were asked, and at first refused, to buy some of his concertos.
The following year Vivaldi travelled to Vienna, where he arrived in
June, and had time to sell some of the scores he had brought with him, before
succumbing to some form of stomach inflammation. He died a month to the day
after his arrival and was buried the same day with as little expense as
possible. As was remarked in Venice, he had once been worth 50,000 ducats a
year, but through his extravagance he died in poverty.
Much of Vivaldi's expenditure was presumably in the opera-house. He was
associated from 1714 with the management of the San Angelo Theatre, a
second-rate house which never1heless began to win a name for decent
performances, whatever its economies in quality and spectacle. Vivaldi is known
to have written some 46 operas, and possible some 40 more than this; he was
also involved as composer and entrepreneur in their production in other houses
in Italy. It was his work in the opera-house that led to Benedetto Marcello's
satirical attack on him in 1720 in Il teatro alla moda, on the frontispiece of
which Aldaviva, alias Vivaldi, is seen as an angel with a fiddle, wearing a
priest's hat, standing on the tiller with one foot raised, as if to beat time. It
has been suggested that "on the fiddle" had similar connotations in
Italian to those it retains in English. Vivaldi had his enemies.
Vivaldi wrote some fifteen concertos for fiauto traverso, the
transverse flute, two of them incomplete, two for solo recorder and three for
an instrument he describes as a fiautino, identifiable with the sopranino
recorder rather than the anachronistic piccolo. The Flute Concerto in F major,
RV 434, the second in that key, was published in Amsterdam as part of the set of
six flute concertos that form Opus 10. It is closely related to the Recorder
Concerto, RV 442, designed for an instrument of slightly different range. The
Concerto in A minor, RV 108, was written for recorder and two violins, listed
among those for a group of solo instruments. The Concer1o for two flutes, RV
533, is one of a score written for pairs of similar or different instruments.
The autograph clearly allocates it to two transverse flutes, which offer a
central slow movement with the aid of only harpsichord and cello, before the
return of the rest of the strings for the last movement.
The three solo concertos for fiautino have allowed writers to speculate
on the nature of the instrument so described. It seems now agreed that the
instrument in question is the sopranino recorder, and not the piccolo, which
appears slightly later in the century, or the flageolet, usually so designated
by Vivaldi. The composer shows no mercy for the player of the little
instrument, treated, in spite of its size, with full seriousness of musical
purpose.