![]() ![]() Many professional violinists keep it under their fingers, knowing full well they may be asked to perform it at any time. Even the most casual listener will recognize its characterful melodies and bouncy rhythms. If you were to make a list of classical music’s greatest hits over the centuries, or even last year, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons would be close to the very top. Vivaldi divided each concerto into three movements (fast–slow–fast), and, likewise, each linked sonnet into three sections.By Inge Kjemtrup | From the July-August 2022 issue of Strings magazine The music is elsewhere similarly evocative of other natural sounds. For example, in the middle section of "Spring", when the goatherd sleeps, his barking dog can be heard in the viola section. Vivaldi took great pains to relate his music to the texts of the poems, translating the poetic lines themselves directly into the music on the page. The concerti therefore stand as one of the earliest and most detailed examples of what would come to be called program music-in other words, music with a narrative element. Unusually for the period, Vivaldi published the concerti with accompanying sonnets (possibly written by the composer himself) that elucidated what it was in the spirit of each season that his music was intended to evoke. They were a revolution in musical conception: in them Vivaldi represented flowing creeks, singing birds (of different species, each specifically characterized), a shepherd and his barking dog, buzzing flies, storms, drunken dancers, hunting parties from both the hunters' and the prey's point of view, frozen landscapes, and warm winter fires. The inspiration for the concertos is not the countryside around Mantua, as initially supposed, where Vivaldi was living at the time, since according to Karl Heller they could have been written as early as 1716–1717, while Vivaldi was engaged with the court of Mantua only in 1718. ![]() ![]() Though three of the concerti are wholly original, the first, "Spring", borrows patterns from a sinfonia in the first act of Vivaldi's contemporaneous opera Il Giustino. The Four Seasons is the best known of Vivaldi's works. Set of four violin concertos by Antonio Vivaldi Antonio Vivaldi (engraving by François Morellon de La Cave, from Michel-Charles Le Cène's edition of Vivaldi's Op. ![]()
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