Antonio Vivaldi (1678 - 1741)
Concerto in F Major for Oboe, Strings and
Basso Continuo, No.2, RV 455
Concerto in G Minor for Violin, Strings
and Basso Continuo, Op. 12 No.1, RV 317
Concerto in D Major for Guitar and
Strings (Lute Concerto RV 93)
Concerto in B Flat Major for Oboe,
Violin, Strings and Basso Continuo, RV 548
Concerto in D Minor for Trumpet and
Strings (transcribed by Jean Thilde)
Concerto in G Minor for Two Celli,
Strings and Basso Continuo, RV 531
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 Piet8. 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 nevertheless 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 possibly 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 twenty concertos for
solo oboe, strings and basso continuo. The Oboe Concerto in F major, RV 455, is
in the usual three movements and in a characteristic musical idiom that
contains in itself an infinite variety. The manuscript Sassonia on the
score is presumably a reference to performance in Dresden, where Vivaldi's
friend and pupil, the violinist Pisendel, presided over an orchestra that
included excellent wind-players. The oboe, however, was also played at the
Pietà.
The Concerto in G minor for
violin, strings and basso continuo, RV 317, formed part of the group of six
concertos published in 1729 in Amsterdam by Le Cane, the series making, with Opus
11, published in the same year, the now usual set of twelve. The D major
Lute Concerto, RV 93, here played on the guitar, belongs to a group of
concertos written for various combinations of instruments and makes use of a
lute and two violins, with basso continuo. The autograph carries a dedication
apparently to Count Johann Joseph von Wrtby, an imperial official of some
importance in Prague. From this and from the paper on which the autograph is
written, it has been plausibly suggested that the work was written during
Vivaldi's visit to Bohemia in 1730.
In addition to solo concertos, Vivaldi
wrote concertos for groups of solo instruments. The Concerto for oboe,
violin, strings and basso continuo, RV 548, is the second for a combination of
solo instruments that Bach also found of interest. It is followed by an
arrangement for solo trumpet of a Concerto in D minor. Although trumpets
were occasionally needed in church music written for the Pieta and for secular
dramatic occasions, they do not seem to have formed part of the normal
instrumentarium of the Pieta, where they might have seemed both inelegant and
irreligious. The present arrangement, one of several by Jean Thilde, make a
useful addition to the solo trumpet repertoire.
The Concerto for two solo cellos,
with strings and basso continuo, RV 531, is the only one for such a pair of
instruments, the sonorities of which it exploits to excellent effect, an
example of the mastery that shows itself, as Goethe later suggested, in
limitations of form.