50 Fun Facts About Antonio Vivaldi

Antonio Vivaldi, ordained in 1703, was nicknamed the Red Priest in Venice because of the colour of what?

His hair was red, a Vivaldi family trait, and it gave the young cleric a name that stuck for life. He kept the nickname even though he soon stopped saying public Mass.

The orchestra Vivaldi trained at Venice's Pietà drew visitors from across Europe, and its players were all what?

Female musicians filled every seat, performing behind a metal grille that screened them from the audience. Most of them stayed at the Pietà for their entire lives.

Vivaldi taught music for decades at Venice's Ospedale della Pietà, which was what kind of institution?

An orphanage for abandoned children, the Pietà took in infants through a window only large enough for a baby. Vivaldi joined in 1703 as its master of violin.

Hoping for an emperor's patronage, Vivaldi left Venice late in life and died poor in 1741 in which city?

Vienna was meant to be a fresh start, but the emperor died soon after Vivaldi arrived. Left without a patron or a steady income, he died within a year and was buried in a simple grave.

Which composer arranged ten of Vivaldi's concertos for keyboard, including one reworked for four harpsichords?

Johann Sebastian Bach learned from Vivaldi by transcribing him, turning six concertos into solo keyboard pieces and three into organ works. The Italian style left a deep mark on his own music.

Vivaldi published each concerto of The Four Seasons alongside which kind of poem describing the scenes in the music?

A sonnet accompanies each season, and its author may have been Vivaldi himself. Each poem splits into three sections that match the three movements of its concerto.

Which violinist's 1989 recording of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons sold over three million copies with pop-style marketing?

Nigel Kennedy's album with the English Chamber Orchestra became one of the best-selling classical recordings ever. It was promoted like a pop release, with a single, billboards and TV adverts.

A crater named in 1976 after the composer Antonio Vivaldi lies on which body in the Solar System?

Mercury has a crater called Vivaldi, a name approved by the International Astronomical Union. Its inner ring of peaks measures about half the width of the outer ring.

Giovanni Battista Vivaldi, who taught his son Antonio the violin, had worked in which trade before becoming a musician?

Barber was Giovanni Battista's first trade, before he turned professional violinist and helped found an association of Venetian musicians. He toured the city playing alongside young Antonio.

Vivaldi's own notes mark sleeping drunkards in the second movement of which concerto from The Four Seasons?

Autumn carries Vivaldi's caption that the drunkards have fallen asleep, written over its second movement. Other captions in the score mark the languor of a hot day and a dog that will not stop barking.

Vivaldi's lifelong tightness of the chest, which kept him off wind instruments, is usually read as which condition?

Asthma is the usual reading of the symptom Vivaldi called strettezza di petto. It never stopped him from mastering the violin, composing or travelling widely.

Which composer recomposed Vivaldi's The Four Seasons in 2012, discarding about three-quarters of the original material?

Max Richter kept only a quarter of Vivaldi's notes, then looped and phased them in his own minimalist style. The violinist Daniel Hope played the solo part on the first recording.

Which 1979 film features music from the first movement of Vivaldi's Mandolin Concerto in C major?

Kramer vs. Kramer borrowed a piece Vivaldi wrote in 1725, more than 250 years before the film was made. The concerto, catalogued as RV 425, has three short movements.

Although Vivaldi worked in Venice, The Four Seasons was first printed in 1725 in which foreign city?

Amsterdam was home to the publisher Michel-Charles Le Cène, who issued the set. Vivaldi had first chosen a foreign printer there in 1711 for his breakthrough Opus 3.

The Four Seasons opens Vivaldi's Opus 8, a set of twelve concertos titled The Contest Between Harmony and what?

Invention, in the title, stands for creative imagination set against strict technique. The Italian word for contest can also mean a test, so Vivaldi may have been advertising his skill at both.

Vivaldi's The Four Seasons depicts storms, birdsong and barking dogs, making it an early example of which genre?

Program music paints a scene or tells a story without words, and Vivaldi was determined to prove it could be taken seriously. He matched his score closely to the printed poems.

Each concerto in Vivaldi's The Four Seasons arranges its three movements in which order of tempos?

Fast–slow–fast is the shape of all four concertos, and each accompanying poem is split three ways to match. Vivaldi helped turn the solo concerto into a widely followed form.

In the second movement of Spring from Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, which instrument imitates a goatherd's barking dog?

Viola players take the part of the dog, barking away while the goatherd sleeps. Vivaldi even wrote the words for a barking dog into the score as an instruction.

Who baptised the newborn Antonio Vivaldi at home immediately after his birth in 1678, probably because of poor health?

The midwife performed the emergency baptism herself, and the church ceremonies were supplied two months later. Vivaldi's health stayed fragile for the rest of his life.

Which Holy Roman Emperor gave Vivaldi a knighthood and a gold medal after meeting him in Trieste in 1728?

Charles VI was such an admirer that Vivaldi dedicated his Opus 9 concertos, La cetra, to him. The emperor's death years later left the composer stranded without a patron.

Vivaldi's breakthrough 1711 concerto set, dedicated to a Tuscan prince, was published under which Italian title?

L'estro armonico, Vivaldi's Opus 3, has been called perhaps the most influential set of instrumental music of the whole eighteenth century. It was the first time his concertos appeared in print.

Vivaldi's best-known sacred choral work, catalogued as RV 589, is a setting of which Latin hymn?

Gloria, in the RV 589 setting, lay forgotten until Alfredo Casella revived it at a Vivaldi Week in 1939. Vivaldi wrote at least three settings of the text, and one of them is lost.

In 1926, fourteen bound volumes of Vivaldi's long-lost music turned up in what kind of building in Piedmont?

A monastery had kept the volumes, which were thought to have been lost during the Napoleonic Wars. They held 300 concertos, 19 operas and more than 100 vocal works.

Vivaldi's oratorio Juditha triumphans celebrated Venice's 1716 victory over the Turks in the siege of which island?

Corfu held out after a Turkish landing in July 1716, and Venice rejoiced. At the Pietà, every role in the oratorio, the enemy general included, was sung by the house's own singers.

Which violinist passed off his own Concerto in C as a rediscovered Vivaldi work, helping to revive Vivaldi's reputation?

Fritz Kreisler admitted in 1935 that he had written several pieces he had credited to older composers. His fake Vivaldi concerto spurred the French scholar Marc Pincherle to study the real thing.

Which American poet, with the violinist Olga Rudge, became a key figure in the Vivaldi revival of the 1930s?

Ezra Pound organised a concert series in the Italian town of Rapallo, where Rudge performed. She went on to publish a catalogue of Vivaldi's works and to publicise hundreds of forgotten concertos.

Which older Italian composer, who pioneered the concerto grosso in Rome, was one of Vivaldi's biggest influences?

Arcangelo Corelli set a small group of soloists against a full string orchestra, and several concertos in Vivaldi's Opus 3 follow that Roman model. Vivaldi's own speciality became the single soloist.

Around 1718 Vivaldi left Venice to become court music director for the governor of which Italian city?

Mantua employed him for three years as maestro di cappella to Prince Philip of Hesse-Darmstadt. He produced several operas there before moving on to Milan and Rome.

The governors of Venice's Pietà voted seven to six in 1709 to do what to their violin master Vivaldi?

Let him go was the verdict, and it did not last: after a spell as a freelance he was recalled in 1711 by a unanimous vote. Five years later he was put in charge of all the music there.

Benedetto Marcello's satire Il teatro alla moda mocked Vivaldi under which thinly disguised name?

Aldiviva, an anagram of A. Vivaldi, is printed under the cover engraving. The drawing shows a little angel in a priest's hat playing the violin on a boat that stood for Vivaldi's opera house.

Which Geneva-born philosopher published his own flute arrangement of Spring from Vivaldi's The Four Seasons in 1775?

Rousseau was a composer as well as a writer, and his flute version came fifty years after the concertos were first printed. By then Spring had already been turned into a French choral motet.

Which choreographer set his 1957 ballet Square Dance to concertos from Vivaldi's Opus 3?

George Balanchine first staged it with the musicians on stage and a square dance caller calling out the steps. He dropped the caller when he revised the ballet in 1976.

The first American recording of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons was made in 1947 in which New York concert venue?

Carnegie Hall hosted the violinist Louis Kaufman in the final week of 1947, just ahead of a recording ban due on New Year's Day. The discs were later elected to the Grammy Hall of Fame.

Vivaldi brought which woodwind instrument to prominence by featuring it in thirty-nine of his concertos?

Bassoon was the solo instrument Vivaldi wrote most concertos for after the violin, at a time when it mostly reinforced the bass line. Two of the thirty-nine survive only in incomplete form.

Vivaldi's lost Motezuma, an early opera set in the Americas, resurfaced in 2002 in an archive in which city?

Berlin's Sing-Akademie archive held about 70 per cent of the music, found by the musicologist Steffen Voss. The opera gives its Aztec ruler a happy ending that history did not.

In the RV numbers that identify Vivaldi's works, the letter R stands for which cataloguer's surname?

Ryom is Peter Ryom, the Danish musicologist whose catalogue first appeared in 1973. He thought of naming it the Vivaldi-Werke-Verzeichnis before deciding to put his own name on it.

A popular legend wrongly places which future composer among the choirboys at Vivaldi's funeral in 1741?

Joseph Haydn really was a cathedral choirboy in the city at the time, which is how the story took hold. But no music was performed at the modest funeral, so he had no part in it.

A persistent but false story claims which natural disaster struck Venice on the day Vivaldi was born in 1678?

An earthquake did shake Venice on 17 April 1688, ten years after Vivaldi's birth, and the rumour may have grown from that. It was told to explain his hasty baptism at home.

Which celebrated court poet wrote the librettos Vivaldi set as the operas L'Olimpiade and Catone in Utica?

Pietro Metastasio was the leading poet of the Arcadian movement. Vivaldi reworked the opening of Winter from The Four Seasons for an aria on one of his texts.

Which singer, Vivaldi's protégée and favourite prima donna, performed more of his operas than anyone else?

Anna Girò was a wig maker's daughter who made her Venetian debut in 1724. Gossip about the pair followed them for years, and Vivaldi flatly denied any romance in a 1737 letter.

The flute sonatas Il pastor fido, long published under Vivaldi's name, were really composed by which Frenchman?

Nicolas Chédeville also arranged The Four Seasons in 1739, with a part for the musette. His sonatas were counted among Vivaldi's works by mistake.

A Holy Roman Emperor reportedly spoke more with Vivaldi at their one meeting than he had in two years with whom?

His ministers got less conversation in two years than the composer did in a single meeting, or so the story goes. The emperor also sent Vivaldi away with a gold medal and a knighthood.

To pay for his final move abroad, Vivaldi sold off large numbers of what at paltry prices?

His manuscripts went cheaply because Venetian taste had moved on and his music had come to seem outmoded. He hoped to start again as a composer at an imperial court.

In 1739 a French arranger rescored Vivaldi's The Four Seasons for flute, violin and which crank-turned instrument?

Hurdy-gurdy playing was in fashion among the French nobility, who had acquired a taste for rustic diversions. The arrangement was published under a title promising amusing seasons.

Vivaldi, contracted to supply the Pietà with two concertos a month, wrote roughly how many concertos in all?

500 is the usual round figure, and about 230 of them are for solo violin. The rest feature soloists ranging from cello and oboe to lute and mandolin.

Vivaldi's Stabat Mater is heard on the soundtrack of which 1999 film?

The Talented Mr. Ripley borrowed a work Vivaldi wrote for solo alto and strings. He seems to have composed it in haste, setting only part of the hymn and repeating whole movements.

Which celebrated Venetian playwright was hired to adapt the libretto of Vivaldi's opera Griselda?

Carlo Goldoni reworked an older libretto by Apostolo Zeno, itself drawn from a tale in Boccaccio's Decameron. The partnership began badly, but it is the reason the opera is remembered.

Vivaldi's first opera, staged in Vicenza in 1713 rather than in Venice, was which work?

Ottone in villa opened at the Garzerie Theater in Vicenza. A year later Vivaldi was running a Venetian opera house himself, where his next opera closed after a couple of weeks.

In 1714 Vivaldi became impresario of which Venetian opera house, where many of his stage works had their premieres?

Teatro San Angelo staged his Orlando finto pazzo that year, and it closed after a couple of weeks. His later premieres there included Farnace and Motezuma.

Which Italian chamber ensemble has probably recorded Vivaldi's The Four Seasons more often than any other group?

I Musici first recorded the set in 1955 and returned to it in stereo four years later. They were still recording it in 2021.