Vivaldi — The Four Seasons

‘Here comes the spring, and festively, the birds salute her with a merry song’

Vivaldi’s timeless evocation of nature — and a showcase of virtuosic Baroque brilliance.

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When?

Published in Amsterdam in 1725, the same year that…

• England continues to recover from the burst of the ‘South Sea Bubble’ (1720), which had caused its stock market to crash and led to widespread bankruptcies.
• Catherine I begins her two-year reign as the Empress of All the Russias — ruling over the empire established by her husband Peter the Great four years earlier. The empire would last until 1917.
• The population of American colonists reaches 475,000. Boston, with 12,000, is the largest city, followed by Philadelphia and New York.
• Jonathan Swift completes Gulliver’s Travels.
• In art and design, the elegant and highly sensual Rococo style, with its elaborate curves, light colours, painted gold and mirrors, flourishes in France and Italy; the musical equivalent, style galant, comes later, around 1750.

Fast facts

• Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons are early examples of the concerto form: a musical structure designed to show off the virtuosity of the solo instrument, which in this case is the violin.
• Concertos typically have three ‘movements’: self-contained sections, each characterised by a particular tempo or mood. The most common pattern for concertos was to begin and end with fast, upbeat movements, and have a slower, more poetic movement in between.
• Before Vivaldi, the solo line in a concerto was more like a musical decoration; in Vivaldi’s concertos, the contast between full orchestra and solo instrument becomes the key element in the structure of the whole piece, with the orchestra acting as a musical refrain or chorus (the ‘ritornello’) which alternates with a series of contrasting verses featuring the soloist.
• With his concertos, Vivaldi set new standards for virtuosity, requiring soloists to play faster and more difficult music than ever before. He also introduced some striking musical effects in the orchestral writing; for example, he sometimes has all the orchestral instruments playing the same tune, in unison; you can hear this effect in the ‘storm’ music in the first movement of Spring, and at the beginning of the third movement of Summer.
• Unlike modern violins, which have metal strings, the violins (and indeed, the violas, cellos and double basses) in Vivaldi’s day had strings made of animal gut, giving the instruments a gentler, more mellow sound.
• Unlike modern violins, which have metal strings, the violins (and indeed, the violas, cellos and double basses) in Vivaldi’s day had strings made of animal gut, giving the instruments a gentler, more mellow sound.