In the presence of his seven hundred authenticated works the verifiable
data on Vivaldi’s life bulks astonishingly small. Mare Pincherle, the lead-
ing authority on this busiest of baroque masters, is able to say all there is
to say about the composer’s career in sixty-three pages, and close reading
discloses few “hard” biographical facts even in that most authoritative
of scholarly sources. One would expect that any musician who achieved
wide fame in his own time, as Vivaldi did beyond a doubt, might have
been vouchsafed some small attention by contemporary ‘historians—and
not only in Italy, for his music was performed regularly in every im-
portant European city. Shortly before his death, however, Vivaldi’s name
began to disappear from concert programs everywhere, and after his
passing it was as if he had never lived. Vogues in that era were ferocious;
you were “in” or all the way out. You will find no mention of him nor
his once-ubiquitous music in the Italian (or any other) “standard
references” of the mid-eighteenth century!
Only long years later, after Mendelssohn’s historic 1829 performance of
the “St. Matthew Passion” had led to the most exhaustive exhumation
of an equally forgotten master, did any modicum of recognition accrue to
Vivaldi, and then only because the belatedly venerated Bach had done
him the honor of transcribing a handful of his four hundred and fifty-four
concerti. (The early Bach scholar Johann Nikolaus Forkel had remarked
on this in 1803, but scholars do not spark revival movements.) And before
the nineteenth century was done, incredibly, some perverse German
chauvinism had inculcated a complete reversal of the true relation
between Bach and Vivaldi. So that e.g., the Count Paul Waldersee could
write in 1885 that the survival of those hyphenated Vivaldi works was
due solely to their transcription by Bach!
This absurd distortion of national pride was put right in 1905 by Arnold
Schering, whose monumental Geschichte des Instrumentalkonzerts re-
vealed once and for all the significance properly due and owing to
Vivaldi in the history of the tonal art. And the Schering study (based on
what few manuscripts were extant plus the only published pieces—
Opp. 1-13) was confirmed absolutely after the 1926 discovery of a
treasure-trove in Vivaldi autographs which had been gathering dust in
the back stacks of the library at the Collegio San Carlo, an institution
operated by the Salesian Fathers in the Borgo of San Martino, in the
Monferrato district of the Alessandria province in Piedmont. How all
this music got there, how it got out of there, and how it was finally
collated with another “lost” collection to form the basis of the Vivaldi
Institute, makes for a detective story of heroic proportions which cannot
be recounted with any justice in this space. But one should know at
least that the hero of this fantastic tale was Prof. Alberto Gentili of
Turin University, whose really immense contribution to musical scholar-
ship was never disclosed to the world during the Mussolini years because
Dr. Gentili happened to be a Jew. Vindication came only in 1947, when
he was elaborately presented with the first copy off the press of Volume 1
of the Institute’s projected complete edition of Vivaldi’s works at the
behest of Antonio Fanna—the “F.” who, with the “P.” for Pincherle, is
linked to Vivaldi titles as irrevocably as Kéchel’s “K.” is to any work of
Mozart. (Fanna’s system is based on groupings by type, whereas the
Pincherle numbers proceed from a systematic classification of themes;
hence The Four Seasons is F. I Nos. 22/25 and also P. 241, 336, 257,
and 442 in that order.)
What, now, of Vivaldi himself? No one can say with certainty when he
was born, but all evidence points to 1678 (seven years before Bach, Han-
del, and Domenico Scarlatti). The place was surely Venice, where his
father was a violinist in the service of the ducal chapel of San Marco. It
is entirely possible that the composer’s musical education was limited to
what he learned at home, but there is some conjecture that he studied
also with his father’s boss, Giovanni Legrenzi (a locally respected
pedagogue who is credited with having written twenty operas). Vivaldi
seems to have begun his career even as a very young boy—we do not
know how young—as a substitute violinist at the ducal chapel. The
records of the Venetian patriarchate show that he was tonsured and
received the minor orders in 1693-96, and that he received the holy orders
sometime between 1699 and March twenty-third, 1703, which was the
date of his ordination as a Roman Catholic priest.
It is apparently an annotative imperative to speak of Vivaldi’s sobriquet
of Il prete rosso—“The Red Priest.” The librettist Carlo Goldoni, who
knew him, ascribed the nickname to his carrot-colored hair. Others main-
tain that it derives from his penchant for wearing robes of flaming
crimson to the discomfiture of his fellow clerics. Whatever the truth of
the matter, it is established that Vivaldi’s active priesthood lasted but a
single year!
There is preserved a fascinating letter written by Vivaldi to one of his
patrons, the Marquis Guido Bentivoglio, after he had been denied per-
mission to enter Ferrara by the Cardinal on the grounds that he did not
say Mass and, moreover, traveled with female singers. Here is what
Vivaldi wrote, in November of 1737:
It was twenty-five years ago that I said Mass for what will be the
last time . . . having on three occasions had to leave the altar
without completing it because of . .. an ailment that has burdened
me since birth.
For this same reason I nearly always live at home, and I only go
out in a gondola or coach, because I can no longer walk on
account of . . . this tightness in the chest [strettezza di petto,
believed to refer to a kind of asthma] . .. I have spent three
carnival seasons at Rome for the opera and, as Your Eminence
knows, I never said Mass; I played the violin in the opera house,
and it is known that His Holiness himself wished to hear me play
and that I received profuse thanks . . . I was at Mantua for three
years in the service of the exceedingly devout prince of Darmstadt
with those same women, who have always been treated by His
Serene Highness with great benevolence, and I never said Mass.
My travels have always been very costly because I have always had
to make them with four or five persons to assist me . . . What
troubles me the most is the stain with which His Eminence
Cardinal Ruffo marks these poor women; nobody has ever done
that...
The reader must give Vivaldi some benefit of doubt, but even the
sympathetic Pincherle concedes the “singularity of his ways.” Still, the
foregoing is rather more persuasive than the following:
One day when Vivaldi was saying Mass, a fugue subject came to
his mind. He at once left the altar where he was officiating and
repaired to the sacristy to write out his theme; then he came back
to finish the Mass. He was reported to the Inquisition, which
happily looked upon him as a musician, that is, as a madman, and
limited itself to forbidding him to say Mass from that time forward.
There are several things wrong with this account by P. L. Roualle
de Boisgelou, the first being that it was written some six decades after
the composer’s death. For another, Vivaldi served for almost forty years
as music director of the Church-operated Seminario musicale dell’Ospitale
della Piet&, a famous establishment (staffed by priests and nuns) devoted
to the musical training of foundling girls. And the register of St. Stephen’s
parish in Vienna, where Vivaldi died in July of 1741, unequivocally lists
the deceased as a priest.
Whether or not he indulged in eccentricities of clothing is as unconfirmed
as the nature of his “chest ailment,” although the latter would seem to
have been patently psychosomatic in the light of his surviving for sixty-
odd years. Further as to the implication by de Boisgelou that Vivaldi
was more musical than religious, however, it is worthwhile citing
Ernst Ludwig Gerber’s Lexikon der Tonkiinstler of 1790-92. The com-
poser, he stated flatly, was “exaggeratedly pious, so that he would not
put his rosary aside nntil he took up his pen . . . which happened fre-
quently.” Gerber’s humor was presumably unwitting—surely he could not
have suspected how often Vivaldi took up his pen!
Nor did Vivaldi ever take up his pen with more success than on the
occasion sometime in the 1720’s when he composed Le quattro stagioni
for the Count Venceslao Morzin—in whose household a promising young
composer named Joseph Haydn would serve as music master some years
later. Actually, Vivaldi’s Op. 8 comprises a dozen violin concerti, and the
whole is entitled I! Cimento dell Armonia e delI'Inventione (“The Test
of Harmony and Inspiration”). But the first four of these twelve works
were conceived separately as a cycle, I concerti della stagioni (“The
Concerti of the Seasons”), and accordingly they have been heard more
often out of context than in it, beginning shortly after their publication
in 1725. The four concerti are subtitled, needless to say, in turn La
primavera, L’estate, L’autunno, and L’inverno (“Spring,” “Summer,”
“Autumn,” and “Winter”). For the first edition Vivaldi prefaced each
with an “explicatory” and appropriately seasonal sonnet. No poet is
credited. It may have been Vivaldi himself.
Much has been made of the programmatic qualities in this music; it is
indeed something special in its verisimilitude. There had been program
music before Vivaldi, of course—the earlier Jannequin and Banchieri and
the roughly contemporary Kuhnau, Rameau, Marais, and Frangois
Couperin all wrote lots of it. But there is general assent that Vivaldi’s
approximation of the familiar cyclical moods is an extraordinary achieve-
ment, and especially for the early eighteenth century. What is even more
extraordinary is that this miracle of tone-painting was accomplished
without the slightest sacrifice of form, which is all baroque perfection
(with more than a foretaste of romanticism!) and brimful of melodic
invention in the bargain. Moreover, Vivaldi’s score indications are pain-
stakingly detailed, with every last ornamentation assigned a place in the
auditory tableaux.
The wonder is that there could have been a time when, once exposed to
this unique masterwork, the world would allow it to slip into obscurity.
This time, one may reasonably predict, it will not get away.
Notes by JAMES LYONS
Editor, The American Record Guide
cover art DONALD LEAKE. Printed in U. S. A.
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