Here’s what you may already know about Antonio Vivaldi:
1. He wrote The Four Seasons.
2. He . . . wrote lots of other stuff, behaving kind of like a one-man composition factory.
3. Ummm, he was known as “the red priest”?
We’ll dispose of #3 first, as that’s the easiest to address: the nickname is a reference to Vivaldi’s hair color, and he was ordained as a priest in the Roman Catholic church at age 25, so that’s that. (Although of course you can’t see his real hair in the picture.)
His most famous work is indeed a set of violin concertos called The Four Seasons. But my goodness—talk about the tip of the iceberg! Here’s what we think he produced during his rather short lifetime:
1. More than 500 concertos.
2. 46 operas that we can catalog, although in a letter Vivaldi claimed to have written 94 of them. He’s probably telling the truth! A trove of his previously-unknown compositions was unearthed in 1926 that contained 300 concertos, 19 operas and over 100 vocal-instrumental works.
3. Hundreds of sacred works, including many for chorus and orchestra.
Obviously the man was the Stephen King of Baroque music. I always wonder about people like that who can produce a seemingly never-ending stream of creative work as if the material just wells up inside of them and demands to be recorded. Maybe a better alter ego for Vivaldi is Anthony Trollope, the prolific 19th-century novelist who got up every morning to write for a certain amount of time before he headed off to his day job as head of the British postal system. If he finished one novel before his allotted time was up that morning he just started a new one. There’s always the temptation to think that someone with such prodigious output must be producing a lot of dreck, or maybe the same basic stuff over and over again. But if we look at Vivaldi’s best-known works we have to admit that they’re world class. It’s too bad, really, that a work such as the Seasons has become so familiar and so used as background music that we don’t fully appreciate it.
But on to the question at hand: Vivaldi’s “clientele.” I mean, like, who are all these operas and concerti and choral works for? He wasn’t just writing music for the sheer pleasure of scribbling down notes, was he? In reality, Vivaldi had a day job too, just like Trollope: for 30 years or so he was the music director of the Ospedale della Pietà (“Hospital of Mercy”) in Venice, his birthplace. “Hospital” here doesn’t mean a place of care for the sick; it’s a place of refuge, in this case for orphans. Or, rather, “orphans.” Many sources will say that the children and teens in this and the other three ospedales were indeed orphans and indeed needy, and that the Republic of Venice contributed to their care through these orphanages. The inhabitants were given a good education, with the all-girls population of Vivaldi’s employer being trained specifically in music under his direction. He started out as the violin master and eventually became choir master, being expected to produce new works for Roman Catholic holy days and prepare the girls for performance. Indeed, the all-female choir at this orphanage became famous all over Europe, with travelers coming to Venice specifically to hear them perform at the church next to the orphanage. In order to keep the focus on the angelic voices of the girls and not on their looks, they sang in the balcony behind screens.
But who were the orphans, really? How likely does it seem to you that children of the streets were scooped up and given such great training? Might be nice to think that this would happen, with the big-hearted Venetian Republic opening up its coffers to give destitute children a chance in life. In reality, though—sigh–it seems that these children weren’t actually orphans at all, but the offspring of wealthy Venetian leaders and their mistresses. Let me quote here from a great post I ran across while researching this topic:
These ‘orphans’ were usually the illegitimate daughters of the city’s wealthy noblemen and their numerous mistresses, which explains the generous endowments that meant the girls were well cared for and given the best musical tuition available. (“Vivaldi – Gloria in D: Why Vivaldi had to hide his singers away”)
So Vivaldi had a ready-made outlet for his choral and orchestral music, being required to produce these works but also not having to worry about whether or not his works would ever get a hearing. As for his operas, he started writing those very much as a sideline. Opera was tremendously popular in Venice during his lifetime, with several opera houses competing for audiences and production material. You can imagine him getting up early to finish up an opera draft, then scurrying off to a rehearsal of his girls’ choir, then putting in some time after lunch to start thinking about the next saint’s day celebration, then getting the girls up into the church balcony for their performance, and perhaps squeezing in a few private violin lessons here and there. All this from a man who suffered from very bad health. But I’ll talk a little more about his personal life in the next post.
For now, though, here’s a fascinating video of a historically-correct performance of one of his famous pieces, the Gloria. Wouldn’t you have thought after learning that the piece was written for an all-girls’ choir that it would have been scored for SSAA voices and only later rewritten for SATB? No, my friends. When my own choir performed this piece we did it just as Vivaldi wrote it. The girls sang all the parts, even the lowest ones. As you listen you may think, as I did when I first heard it, “there have to be some guys in there somewhere.” But there aren’t. It’s quite an accomplishment!
