If you’ve been reading my essays for any length of time, you know that I’m kind of obsessed with the details of a composer’s life, or how a certain piece came to be written, or the meaning of the words in a song. Things can get pretty granular at times! So this essay is an attempt to get at the real Vivaldi, the man behind the wig, as it were. He’s a much more interesting—and complicated—figure than you may have thought. As you sing or listen to his glorious music, I hope you’ll be able to picture him going about his life and dealing with all its complications.
Let’s start with Vivaldi’s father, Giovanni Battista Vivaldi, a resident of Venice. We are told that he was a barber before becoming a professional violinist at St. Mark’s Basilica, a little factoid that raises all sorts of interesting questions: Did that post pay more than barbering? Was Mrs. Vivaldi on board with all this? (They ended up with nine children, so money was very definitely a factor in any employment decisions, as there doesn’t seem to be any hint that the Vivaldis were well off.) How exactly did Giovanni decide to make this rather drastic career change? In any case, sources agree that Antonio’s first violin teacher was his dad. Antonio must have been somewhat of a prodigy, because Giovanni took him around Venice to perform, but I don’t know exactly how this worked. Were they basically buskers? When I first read about this “touring,” I thought my sources were saying that Vivaldi had traveled around Europe à la the young Mozart, but then Giovanni wouldn’t have been around to play at the basilica. No, it was just a hometown thing, a side hustle.
When Antonio was 15 he started training to become a priest, beginning a ten-year process that culminated in his ordination in 1703. Now why did he do this? After all, he’d already shown that he was a capable musician, having already appeared in the Basilica orchestra as a “supernumerary” violinist. And some sources say that he felt pushed into the priesthood and proclaimed his distaste for performing Mass. Indeed, within a year or so of his ordination he was given a dispensation to excuse him from doing so. What gives?
What follows here is how I’ve pieced various little hints and tidbits together into what seems to me a coherent whole. I would stress, however, that our information about Vivaldi’s actual life is very fragmentary. Here goes, though:
Vivaldi was a sickly baby and child, suffering from what was very likely asthma, or a “tightness in the chest.” (It’s called “strettezza di petto” in Italian, and doesn’t it sound better in that language?) Because of this ailment he wasn’t able to play wind instruments, but he did excel at the violin. (But that’s the instrument that his father played anyway and taught to his son, so I don’t quite understand this “he couldn’t play wind instruments because of his asthma” thingy, since those instruments didn’t seem to be in the running anyway.) Antonio was the oldest son and so seen as destined for the priesthood. (This idea would not have been acceptable if his family had been wealthy, as the oldest would inherit the family’s fortune, so in that situation it would be the second son who’d be headed for the Church.) Also, he’d have an education and employment for life. Given his poor health, that avenue seemed like a promising one, and he was signed up to begin the process, sticking it out and getting ordained. Parish duties didn’t thrill him, though, and he sometimes had to leave church while performing Mass because of a fit of coughing. Or . . . because he’d suddenly been struck with a musical idea and wanted to write it down before he forgot it. (Apparently the congregants had to sit and wait for him to come back and finish up the ceremony.) Or perhaps both things happened at various times. He wanted to compose, priestly life was getting in the way of that desire, and he had a ready-made excuse. What exactly was the process, though, for being allowed to skip out? An appeal to the bishop of his parish? No clue.
Anyway, he ended up getting hired as a violin teacher at the Ospedale della Pieta that I mentioned last week. Was this his idea or the Church’s? Again, no clue. But he apparently found the life of a music teacher and composer to be much more congenial than that of a priest, and he held positions in this organization for about 30 years, with a few gaps here and there because the governing board of the “orphanage” fired him. Part of the problem seems to have been that Vivaldi wanted to do more than compose for and direct the girls’ choir at the school; as I mentioned last week, he became a prolific opera composer in addition to his prolific production of music for the Church. He was often away from the school, traveling to other cities and indeed other countries to direct performances. But he kept churning out music for the girls, thus earning his quite generous salary.
Around 1717 Vivaldi met a young singer named Anna Tessieri Girò, a mezzo soprano who became a part of his household. She performed in many of the now-famous composer’s operas, with arias being written especially to play to her vocal strengths. Vivaldi vigorously denied that their relationship was anything but professional; that he found it necessary to make this denial tells us that there were certainly rumors about them. Nothing definitive has ever been discovered, though. (Remember, he’s still officially a priest and therefore under his original vow of celibacy even though he’s not performing Masses and other priestly duties.)
Vivaldi became the toast of Europe, receiving commissions from royalty and nobility. He was riding high, but the wheel of fortune doesn’t ever stop. He was at the top, but that position meant that there was nowhere to go but down. His musical style became passé, his commissions dried up, and he held a fire sale of his manuscripts in order to raise money. He was going to make a new start and move permanently to Vienna because he’d made a real connection with Emperor Charles VI during his earlier and more popular years. He seems to have had dreams of spending the rest of his days as a court composer. (Another echo of Mozart, who wanted to get in with Emperor Franz Joseph in the Vienna of the 1780’s.) But alas! Even if Charles had been willing to be Vivaldi’s patron, and it isn’t completely clear that he was, he was not able to follow through on that desire because he died not long after Vivaldi arrived in Vienna. The composer now had no steady source of income and no royal protection, he was seen as out of date, and he became “impoverished.” He died in July 1741 at age 63. (So he ended up living quite a bit longer than Mozart managed!) Like Bach, his music passed into obscurity for many years, and it wasn’t until the 1920’s that his music was rediscovered. It’s a long and fascinating story, and if you’re interested in such matters I’d encourage you to read this article: “Discovering the Rediscovery of Antonio Vivvaldi.”
But the best way to pay tribute to Vivaldi is to listen to his music!
© Debi Simons
