Once dismissed as a lightweight creator of attractive but formulaic instrumental concertos, Vivaldi is now recognized as one of most imaginative and forward-looking composers of the early 18th century. Nicknamed the “Red Priest” (he was ordained in 1703), he had strawberry-colored hair and a fiery temperament to match. Conservatives like English music historian Sir John Hawkins lambasted the Italian’s iconoclastic style as “wild and irregular,” but Vivaldi’s virtuosity on the violin was universally admired. Much of his early music was written for the Ospedale della Pietà, the Venetian girls’ orphanage and conservatory where he served sporadically as violin master beginning in 1703.
Together with his predecessor Arcangelo Corelli, Vivaldi epitomized the brilliantly extraverted Italian style of instrumental music. In his hands, the concerto became at once a vehicle for scintillating pyrotechnics and a medium of unprecedented expressive and coloristic range. Today, his name is virtually synonymous with a set of bravura, richly atmospheric violin concertos depicting the changing seasons of the year. The Four Seasons is the prototype of countless examples of orchestral program music, and over the years it has probably racked up more recordings than any other classical work.
In exploiting the panoply of effects that the Baroque orchestra was capable of producing, Vivaldi established a model that Handel, J. S. Bach, and other composers adopted and adapted. He brought the same talents to bear in his lesser-known body of vocal music, sacred as well as secular. In addition to numerous religious oratorios, motets, cantatas, and serenatas, he composed several dozen operas (94 by his count, although the scores of only 22 have survived) on mythological and historical themes.
With his music increasingly in demand throughout Italy and abroad, the middle-aged Vivaldi traveled far and wide. The early 1720s found him in Rome, where he gave command performances for the pope and composed at least three operas for the Teatro Capranica, the city’s leading public opera house. The last of these, Giustino, is a rags-to-riches drama loosely based on the life of the sixth-century Byzantine emperor Justin I. In the ravishing aria “Vedrò con mio diletto” (“I will delight to see”), the fictional Emperor Anastasio voices his love for his consort (whom the shepherd Giustino has just rescued from a wild boar) and his sorrow at their impending separation. Vivaldi uses the rounded A-B-A structure favored by Baroque composers. The so-called da capo aria, with the first part repeated in ornamented form after a contrasting middle section, not only showed off the singers’ virtuosity but allowed them to reflect on an emotion or event from different perspectives.
Vivaldi’s only extant oratorio, Juditha triumphans (Judith Triumphant) is based on the biblical legend of the Assyrian warrior Holofernes, who literally loses his head for love of the intrepid Jewish heroine Judith. (Allegorically, the work commemorated the Venetian republic’s short-lived victory over the invading Ottoman Turks at Corfu in 1716.) Boldly venturing into the Assyrian camp to plead for peace, Judith responds to Holofernes’s boozy advances by decapitating him in his sleep with his own sword, slipping back through enemy lines, and inspiring the besieged Israelis to rout the attackers. Upon discovering the general’s headless corpse, his servant Vagaus calls for vengeance in the brilliant aria “Armatae face” (“Armed with torches”). The Latin text lent Vivaldi’s work an aura of moral elevation and set it apart from the so-called oratori volgari written in vernacular languages.
Like the D-Major Concerto, RV 93, this unprepossessing work seems to have been written in the early 1730s for the Bohemian nobleman and lute afficionado Count Johann Joseph Von Wrtby. Vivaldi carried on the tradition of the Baroque trio sonata—combining two equal-voiced instruments with basso continuo—that Arcangelo Corelli had developed a generation earlier. Although the C-Major Sonata is cast in the three-movement (fast-slow-fast) format associated with the contemporary Italian instrumental concerto, the character of the music is relaxed and intimate rather than brilliant. Two jaunty, foursquare Allegros frame the minor-key Larghetto, in which the violin’s sustained melody is silhouetted against a sad, stuttering motif in the lute.
Although Vivaldi abandoned his priestly vocation in midlife, he remained a prolific composer of sacred music. The solo cantata Nisi Dominus dates from the mid-1710s, while the “Red Priest” was still resident music master at the Ospedale della Pietà in Venice. The texts of the nine highly varied movements are drawn from Psalm 127 and relate to the theme “Nisi Dominus frustra” (“Without the Lord, all is vain”). In setting the verse “Cum dederit dilectis suis somnum” (translated in the King James Version of the Bible as “for so he giveth his beloved sleep”), Vivaldi created a beguiling musical image of somnolence: The soloist sings a chromatically inflected melody above a muted string accompaniment in lulling siciliana rhythm, while fleeting dissonances heighten the aria’s spiritual intensity.
Like Vivaldi’s operas, Juditha triumphans—which he called a “sacred military oratorio”—consists of alternating solo arias and speech-like recitatives, interspersed with choruses. (Oratorio and opera originated in Italy around the same time, grew up alongside each other, and attracted many of the same composers, performers, and audiences.) Vivaldi’s genius for scene painting is equally manifest in both genres. Juditha triumphans features an unusually large and colorful orchestra that enabled him to conjure a wide array of sonorities, both grand and intimate. In “Veni, veni, me sequere fida” (“Come, come, follow me, my faithful”), Judith consoles her maid Arba to an accompaniment mimicking the cooing of a turtle dove.
This remarkably intimate work is one of three chamber concertos featuring the lute that Vivaldi wrote during a sojourn in Prague in the early 1730s. The work explores the contrast in both timbre and volume between the plucked and bowed string instruments. In the opening Allegro, the lute and violins are sometimes deployed together and sometimes separately, the better to maximize contrast and variety. But the luminous Largo shines the spotlight on the lute alone as it spins out a limpid cantilena melody over the softly shimmering strings and continuo. The second Allegro features graceful garlands of dancing triplets whose fluidity is accentuated by the steady, yet ever-changing, pace of the underlying harmonic rhythm.
Premiered in Venice in 1727, Farnace is a dark drama set against the backdrop of Rome’s conquest of the Hellenistic kingdom of Pontus, on the Black Sea, in 63 BCE. The Pontic ruler Farnace (the historical Pharnaces II) orders his wife to kill their son so as to prevent his enslavement by the victorious Romans under Pompey’s command. Ignorant of her disobedience, Farnace has second thoughts and vents his anguished remorse in “Gelido in ogni vena” (“Icy cold, in every vein”), one of the most powerful tragic arias in all of Baroque opera. The king’s plangent lament for his “innocent child” is vividly underscored by frigid harmonies and stabbing figures in the strings.
Another figure from Roman history lies behind Vivaldi’s debut in the operatic field: Emperor Otho, who reigned for all of four months in 69 (the so-called “Year of the Four Emperors”). The up-and-coming composer, aiming to expand his horizons and gain a foothold in the lucrative world of opera, composed Ottone in villa (Otho at His Villa) in Vicenza in 1713 during a month’s leave of absence from the Ospedale della Pietà. In this semifarcical tale of displaced love and mistaken identity, the young Caio Silio flies into a rage when his ex-fiancée takes a shine to another “man” (the emperor’s sweetheart in disguise). Caio’s “Gelosia” (“Jealousy”) is a fast-and-furious showpiece, full of sparkling coloratura and wrapped around a meltingly lyrical core.
It was largely thanks to Vivaldi that the cello came into its own as a solo instrument in the 18th century: It accounts for 27 of his 350-odd solo concertos. (Not surprisingly, the vast majority feature the composer’s own instrument, the violin, although he also wrote concertos for viola d’amore, flute, oboe, bassoon, recorder, and even mandolin.) The technical demands of the G-Minor Concerto speak highly for the ability of the young women cellists at the Ospedale della Pietà, for one of whom it was presumably written. In the three-movement format that Vivaldi favored, two propulsive and brilliantly virtuosic Allegros frame a luminous, richly ornamented Andante, in which the accompany string ensemble is replaced by a spare continuo.
Premiered in 1723 at Rome’s Teatro Capranica, Ercole su’l Termodonte (Hercules on the Thermodon) revolves around one of the ancient Greek hero’s 12 penitential “labors”: to bring home the magical girdle of the fierce Amazon queen, whose realm bestrides the Thermodon River (in modern Turkey). In a plot twist beloved of 18th-century audiences and dramatists, the queen’s sister Ippolita falls in love with Teseo (Theseus), Hercules’s comrade-in-arms, whom she invokes in this beguiling da capo aria at the beginning of Act II of Vivaldi’s opera. “Onde chiare che sussurrate” (“You bright and babbling waters”) features an appropriately undulating melody for the soprano, accompanied by sweetly warbling violins.
Griselda followed L’Olimpiade on the boards in Venice a year later and boasts a similarly distinguished literary parentage: Apostolo Zeno’s original 1701 libretto, based on a tale from Boccaccio’s The Decameron, was updated to Vivaldi’s specifications by the soon-to-be-celebrated Venetian playwright Carlo Goldoni. In the opera, King Gualtiero subjects the Sicilian peasant Griselda to a series of ordeals in order to prove her worthy of being his queen. The bravura “Agitata da due venti” (“Tossed by two contrary winds”) is sung by their long-lost daughter Costanza, whom Gualtiero has strategically installed in the banished Griselda’s place. She expresses her conflicting emotions in a dazzling display of trills, roulades, acrobatic leaps, and other vocal pyrotechnics.
—Harry Haskell