42 Fun Facts About Vivaldi's Four Seasons

Vivaldi was a leading composer of which era of music history?

Baroque: when the style passed, Vivaldi's music fell out of fashion for almost two centuries, and The Four Seasons became a favourite only after recordings in the 1940s brought it back.

In which city were The Four Seasons first published, in 1725?

Amsterdam: Vivaldi had left Italian printers for a Dutch music firm in 1711, and its widely reprinted editions carried his concertos to buyers across Europe.

The Four Seasons open a set of twelve concertos whose Italian title translates as what?

The Contest Between Harmony and Invention is the usual rendering, but 'cimento' can also mean a test, so the title may promise a proving of both skills rather than a fight between them.

Which German composer admired Vivaldi's concertos enough to arrange ten of them for keyboard?

Johann Sebastian Bach reworked ten Vivaldi concertos for harpsichord and organ, and when the Vivaldi revival began two centuries later, those arrangements were how his music was first known again.

Unusually for the period, Vivaldi published each concerto of The Four Seasons alongside what?

A sonnet: Vivaldi also copied its lines into the score above the bars that depict them, so players could see exactly which passage was the birdsong and which the icy wind.

Each of The Four Seasons has three movements in which order of tempos?

Fast–slow–fast: Vivaldi used the plan across hundreds of concertos, and it became the familiar shape of the concerto for the composers who followed him.

In the slow movement of Spring, while the goatherd sleeps, which part of the orchestra imitates his barking dog?

The violas: Vivaldi wrote 'il cane che grida', the barking dog, over their part, and cast the solo violin as the sleeping goatherd and the other violins as the rustling leaves.

Because they depict creeks, birds, storms and drunken dancers, The Four Seasons are an early example of what genre?

Program music is instrumental music that paints a scene or tells a story, and Beethoven later took the same path in his 'Pastoral' Symphony, with its birdcalls and country storm.

In which Italian city did Vivaldi serve as a governor's court music director from 1718 to 1720?

Mantua: the Seasons' country scenes were long credited to the land around the city, though one biographer argues the concertos may predate Vivaldi's arrival there.

In the finale of Spring, the strings imitate which rustic instrument as nymphs and shepherds dance?

Bagpipes: Vivaldi's caption names the zampogna, an Italian shepherd's bagpipe, which is why the strings hold a long drone beneath the dance tune.

In Winter's slow movement, the plucked violins depict not snow but what?

Rain: the solo violin sings of quiet, contented days by the hearth while the plucked notes patter down on everyone left outside.

What do the country folk of Vivaldi's Autumn set out to do at dawn in the concerto's finale?

Go hunting: the music rides out with horns, guns and dogs, then switches sides to follow the terrified animal until, wounded and worn out, it dies.

By his own account, Vivaldi played the violin in private in the 1720s for which powerful listener?

The Pope, by Vivaldi's account, asked to hear him while he was working in Rome during carnival, and years later the composer cited that private audience when defending his reputation to a patron.

Who co-created and stars in Netflix's 2025 series The Four Seasons, scored like Alan Alda's 1981 film with Vivaldi's concertos?

Tina Fey remade the film about married friends who holiday together through a year, and Alda, who wrote and directed the original around Vivaldi's music, turns up in a guest role.

Which American poet, with violinist Olga Rudge, staged concerts in 1930s Italy that helped revive Vivaldi's forgotten music?

Ezra Pound gave his 1936 concert series at Rapallo over to Vivaldi, while Rudge studied the composer's rediscovered manuscripts and went on to publish a catalogue of his works.

Vivaldi was nicknamed 'the Red Priest' for the colour of what?

His hair: the red came from his father, and although Vivaldi gave up saying Mass soon after ordination, the nickname stuck, and a 1723 caricature of him is captioned 'Il Prete rosso'.

In which city was Antonio Vivaldi born in 1678?

Venice was his birthplace, on 4 March 1678; he was baptised at home at once by the midwife, probably for poor health, though legend blames an earthquake that day.

What kind of institution was the Ospedale della Pietà, where Vivaldi worked for decades?

A home for abandoned children: its most gifted girls formed an orchestra and choir so admired that their concerts helped bring in the donations the house depended on.

Vivaldi's lifelong 'tightness of the chest' is now usually interpreted as which condition?

Asthma is the usual modern reading of his 'strettezza di petto', and in a letter of 1737 Vivaldi gave the complaint as his reason for having stopped saying Mass soon after his ordination.

In which city did Vivaldi die, impoverished, in 1741?

Vienna: Vivaldi had gone there late in life, apparently hoping to mend his fortunes, but fell ill, and the plainness of his funeral in July 1741 suggests he died with almost nothing.

Which star violinist of the early 1900s passed off a concerto he had written himself as the work of Vivaldi?

Fritz Kreisler published it among a set of pieces he presented as his arrangements of old masters, and only in 1935 did he admit that he had composed them all himself.

In Summer's slow movement, what besides distant thunder robs the weary shepherd of his rest?

Swarms of flies buzz furiously around him between rumbles of thunder, and in the finale the storm he dreaded breaks and flattens the standing wheat.

Which sacred Latin text did Vivaldi set in a choral work that lay forgotten until 1939 and is now a choir favourite?

Gloria: the composer Alfredo Casella revived it at a 'Vivaldi Week' in Siena, and it is now known simply as 'the Vivaldi Gloria', though a second setting by him also survives.

Which Enlightenment philosopher published a flute version of the Spring concerto in 1775?

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a musician as well as a thinker: his opera 'Le Devin du village' so pleased Louis XV that he could have lived as a fashionable court composer, a life he refused.

Which British violinist's 1989 recording of The Four Seasons sold over two million copies?

Nigel Kennedy: his label sold the record the way pop albums were sold, with a promotional single, billboard posters and TV and radio adverts.

Anne-Sophie Mutter's first recording of The Four Seasons, made in 1984, was conducted by which maestro?

Herbert von Karajan wanted Vivaldi's strings as rich and sustained as in Brahms, a grand manner that lighter period-instrument bands were already starting to sweep aside.

Where did Louis Kaufman record The Four Seasons in the last nights of 1947, racing a union recording ban?

Carnegie Hall was booked solid with other groups racing the same deadline, so Kaufman's players took it for the last four nights of the year and began each session at midnight.

Which Italian ensemble first recorded The Four Seasons with Felix Ayo in 1955 and has re-recorded it many times since?

I Musici, a Roman group that plays without a conductor, had its breakthrough with that 1955 record, a best-seller, and has returned to the Seasons again and again with new soloists.

Which London orchestra's Four Seasons with Alan Loveday sold over half a million copies?

Academy of St Martin in the Fields: Neville Marriner's players, named after the London church where they gave their first concert, made a hit that has hardly left the catalogue since.

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

Max Richter looped and phased the quarter he kept into a lean, minimalist meditation on Vivaldi's tunes, recorded by violinist Daniel Hope for Deutsche Grammophon's Recomposed series.

Found in north-west Italy in the 1920s, Vivaldi's own manuscript collection is now kept in which Italian city's national library?

Turin: two local businessmen, Foà and Giordano, paid for the long-lost volumes and gave them to the library, each in memory of a son who had died young, and the collections still carry the family names.

Which Argentine composer's 'Four Seasons of Buenos Aires' is often paired with Vivaldi's in 'eight seasons' concerts?

Astor Piazzolla wrote four separate tangos; a later arranger wove in quotations from Vivaldi with the hemispheres flipped, so the Buenos Aires 'Summer' borrows from Vivaldi's 'Winter'.

Which Netflix heroine plays Vivaldi's Winter on her cello while a town's new statue goes up in flames?

Wednesday Addams is there to play with the school band at the statue's unveiling, but has her sidekick Thing set it ablaze and performs Vivaldi instead as the townspeople flee in panic.

The Piano Guys' 2014 mash-up paired Vivaldi's Winter with which song from Frozen?

Let It Go: the Utah piano-and-cello group set the film's big ballad against Winter, a concerto that opens with music Vivaldi wrote to depict shivering in the snow with chattering teeth.

Which French film ends with Héloïse overcome by Vivaldi's Summer?

Portrait of a Lady on Fire: it is the music Marianne once picked out for her on a harpsichord, so hearing an orchestra play it years after they parted brings their time together back.

What was Vivaldi's father's trade before he became a professional violinist?

Barber: Giovanni Battista Vivaldi swapped the razor for a place in a church orchestra in 1685, probably gave his son his first violin lessons and stayed at his side as travelling assistant until his own death.

To which Holy Roman Emperor did Vivaldi dedicate his Op. 9 violin concertos, La cetra, in 1727?

Charles VI was the music-loving admirer whose patronage Vivaldi is often said to have been counting on late in life, but the emperor died in 1740, and the composer died poor the next year.

Vivaldi's breakthrough collection of twelve concertos, published in 1711 as Opus 3, is called what?

L'estro armonico was the first set of concertos Vivaldi published and the first he sent to a foreign printer, and it sold so widely that it made his name across Europe.

In a 1737 letter Vivaldi claimed to have written 94 of what, far more than scholars can trace today?

Operas: only about fifty by Vivaldi can be traced, so the 94 may count every show he mounted as his own impresario, a second career that kept him moving from city to city.

Vivaldi's 1716 oratorio Juditha triumphans celebrated his native city's victory over which empire at Corfu?

The Ottoman Empire: Turkish forces gave up their siege of Corfu in August 1716, and Vivaldi's oratorio retold it as the biblical Judith defeating the invader Holofernes, with every role sung by women.

In the first movement of Vivaldi's Summer, which bird sings first, before the turtledove and the goldfinch join in?

Cuckoo: its call breaks the heat-struck stillness of the opening, but the three birds are soon swept aside when the north wind rises and the shepherd weeps for fear of the coming storm.

Where in The Four Seasons does Vivaldi's score note that 'the drunkards have fallen asleep'?

Autumn, second movement: the peasants toast the harvest with so much of 'Bacchus' liquor' during the opening dance that the whole of the next movement is given over to their sleep.