PROGRAMME NOTES
Vivaldi |
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Antonio Vivaldi
(1676 - 1741) Concerto in C for two
Trumpets Antonio
Lucio Vivaldi was born on 4th March 1678. His father, Giovanni Battista, was
a barber who took up the violin and was apparently good enough to dazzle the
authorities at the Basilica di San Marco since in 1685 he got a job performing there and later
performed in operas. Not only did he teach Antonio to play the violin but
soon the Vivaldi father/son performances were regarded as one of the main
tourist attractions of Venice. At the age
of 25 Antonio became the music teacher at an all-girls orphanage school, the
Ospedale della Pičta, one of four such in the city. It was his job to teach
the young girls to play music and to write two concerti each month for them
to perform. This accounts for the number of instruments Vivaldi wrote for,
since he had to showcase each of the young girls' talents. Judging from the
difficulty of the music, these girls, all of them under twenty, possessed
considerable talent. One very
odd element to the performances of these girls in the Chiesa della Pičta was
that the audience could not see the performers as screens divided the viewer
from the orchestra and singers. In consequence the audience returned home
believing the orchestra was made up of only the most heavenly beauties
imaginable, since their only mental image was that provided by the music
being played. If it sounds like paradise for a hot, young maestro, growing up
in a city famed for its voluptuousness and love of fast living, (in the lusty
16th century dawn of tourism, Venice had 11,654 registered tax-paying
prostitutes, dressed in red and yellow 'like tulips'; there was even a guide
book, listing addresses and prices) consider this account by the French
writer, Rousseau: "Vespers…are
performed in barred-off galleries solely by girls, of whom the oldest is not
twenty years of age. I can conceive of nothing as voluptuous, as moving as
this music. What grieved me was these accursed grills, which allowed only
tones to go through and concealed the angels of loveliness of whom they were
worthy. I talked of nothing else. One day I was speaking of it at M. le
Blond's. "If you are so curious," he said to me, "to see these
little girls, I can easily satisfy you. I am one of the administrators of the
house, and I invite you to take a snack with them." When going into the
room that contained these coveted beauties, I felt a tremor of love such as I
never experienced before. M. le Blond introduced me to one after another of
these famous singers whose voices and names were all that were known to me.
"Come, Sophie," -- she was horrible. "Come, Cattina," --
she was blind in one eye. "Come, Bettina, -- the smallpox had disfigured
her. Scarcely one was without some considerable blemish. Two or three,
however looked tolerable; they sang only in the choruses. I was desolate.
During the snack, when we teased them, they made merry. Ugliness does not
exclude charms, and I found some in them. Finally, my way of looking at them
changed so much that I left nearly in love with all these ugly girls." Not all of
the girls at the orphanage were orphans. Many of the girls were poor or
illegitimate, and some were just unruly types for which the Ospedale was
their "reform school". Graduation meant a dowry for each girl,
which was to be used for a husband or a nunnery. As Vivaldi grew in
popularity, so did the fame of his all-female orchestra. Many of Venice's
elite began to send their daughters to the school to study music. It is said
that many noblemen justified this by reasoning their legitimate daughters
should get the same quality education as their illegitimate offspring. |
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Over 500
Vivaldi concerti exist today, as well as 40 cantatas, 22 operas and more that
60 sacred works, and there were many more that have not survived (or been
discovered).The era demanded that the composer be prolific. Older works were
not played unless excessively popular. The task of preserving music was generally
left to collectors of that time, rich noblemen who had commissioned work from
Vivaldi or who had purchased the published form. The works belonged to
whoever paid for the manuscript, not the composer. The composer never saw
royalties for the music that was played - the royalty received the royalties! Antonio
Vivaldi died in 1741. He was far away from home at the time, in Vienna, and
as he had spent the wealth of his lifetime, he was buried in a pauper's
grave. Having
remained popular across Europe his entire life, he fell out of favour during
his last ten years. As the musical world inched its way towards the classical
period, Vivaldi's music was soon forgotten. His name was barely mentioned for
almost two hundred years. All that
remained of the name Vivaldi was in the compositions of Johann Sebastian
Bach. Bach had transcribed several concertos from L'Estro Armonico and
Bach scholars were more interested in what he did with the concertos rather
than in their original composer. The search
for Vivaldi's original concertos, however, was the road to one of music
history's greatest comebacks. The first major discovery was in a music
cabinet in Dresden. Vivaldi had composed a large quantity of music
specifically for the Dresden orchestra, and once it had fallen out of fashion
(in the 1760's) it had been placed in storage where it gathered dust for over
a century. In 1926 a
monastery in Piedmont was looking to sell part of its archives for some
needed cash. They were sitting on a huge collection of music, 97 volumes
worth, which they did not know what to do with nor what it was. This hoard
included 14 volumes of Vivaldi's music, mostly unknown, including over a
hundred concertos, twelve operas, 29 cantatas and a complete oratorio. This
music had sat idle for nearly 200 years, and is perhaps one of the greatest
discoveries in musical history. Seeing that
the collection was not a complete one, it led scholars in search of the
missing half. It was discovered in the private collections of two brothers
whose family had handed down volumes of Vivaldi's music over the past 200
years, unaware, apparently, of its value. These collections were brought by
the Turin National Library where they reside today. |
