Vivaldi's Four Seasons Trivia
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42 free Vivaldi's Four Seasons trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Vivaldi's Four Seasons trivia quiz covers the most famous set of violin concertos ever written and the Venetian priest who composed them. The easy questions ask how many concertos there are, which instrument takes the solo, why Vivaldi was called the Red Priest, where he was born and what the goatherd's dog is doing in the slow movement of Spring. Then it moves into the details of the score: the sonnets printed alongside the music, the three-movement plan, the keys, the larger Opus 8 collection they belong to, and the Amsterdam publisher who issued them in 1725. The hard end is for people who own more than one recording: the count the set was dedicated to, the opera Spring borrows from, Bach's cantata quotation, Rousseau's flute arrangement, the first electrical recording of 1942, Louis Kaufman's Carnegie Hall session, I Musici, Neville Marriner's gold record, Nigel Kennedy's pop-marketed blockbuster, Max Richter's 75-per-cent recomposition, Piazzolla's Buenos Aires answer, and the movements that turned up in Windows 3.0, on The Weather Channel and in Frozen mash-ups. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries on The Four Seasons, Antonio Vivaldi, Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione and the recordings named before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our classical music, Baroque composers and Venice quizzes are natural next stops.
30 of 42 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Vivaldi was a leading composer of which era of music history?
Baroque
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.
Q 02In which city were The Four Seasons first published, in 1725?
Amsterdam
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.
Q 03The Four Seasons open a set of twelve concertos whose Italian title translates as what?
The Contest Between Harmony and Invention
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.
Q 04Which German composer admired Vivaldi's concertos enough to arrange ten of them for keyboard?
Johann Sebastian Bach
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.
Q 05Unusually for the period, Vivaldi published each concerto of The Four Seasons alongside what?
A sonnet
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.
Q 06Each of The Four Seasons has three movements in which order of tempos?
Fast–slow–fast
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.
Q 07In the slow movement of Spring, while the goatherd sleeps, which part of the orchestra imitates his barking dog?
The violas
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.
Q 08Because they depict creeks, birds, storms and drunken dancers, The Four Seasons are an early example of what genre?
Program music
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.
Q 09In which Italian city did Vivaldi serve as a governor's court music director from 1718 to 1720?
Mantua
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.
Q 10In the finale of Spring, the strings imitate which rustic instrument as nymphs and shepherds dance?
Bagpipes
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.
Q 11In Winter's slow movement, the plucked violins depict not snow but what?
Rain
Rain: the solo violin sings of quiet, contented days by the hearth while the plucked notes patter down on everyone left outside.
Q 12What do the country folk of Vivaldi's Autumn set out to do at dawn in the concerto's finale?
Go hunting
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.
Q 13By his own account, Vivaldi played the violin in private in the 1720s for which powerful listener?
The Pope
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.
Q 21Which star violinist of the early 1900s passed off a concerto he had written himself as the work of Vivaldi?
Fritz Kreisler
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.
Q 22In Summer's slow movement, what besides distant thunder robs the weary shepherd of his rest?
Swarms of flies
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.
Q 23Which sacred Latin text did Vivaldi set in a choral work that lay forgotten until 1939 and is now a choir favourite?
Gloria
Q 14Who 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
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.
Q 15Which American poet, with violinist Olga Rudge, staged concerts in 1930s Italy that helped revive Vivaldi's forgotten music?
Ezra Pound
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.
Q 16Vivaldi was nicknamed 'the Red Priest' for the colour of what?
His hair
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'.
Q 17In which city was Antonio Vivaldi born in 1678?
Venice
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.
Q 18What kind of institution was the Ospedale della Pietà, where Vivaldi worked for decades?
A home for abandoned children
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.
Q 19Vivaldi's lifelong 'tightness of the chest' is now usually interpreted as which condition?
Asthma
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.
Q 20In which city did Vivaldi die, impoverished, in 1741?
Vienna
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.
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.
Q 24Which Enlightenment philosopher published a flute version of the Spring concerto in 1775?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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.
Q 25Which British violinist's 1989 recording of The Four Seasons sold over two million copies?
Nigel Kennedy
Nigel Kennedy: his label sold the record the way pop albums were sold, with a promotional single, billboard posters and TV and radio adverts.
Q 26Anne-Sophie Mutter's first recording of The Four Seasons, made in 1984, was conducted by which maestro?
Herbert von Karajan
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.
Q 27Where did Louis Kaufman record The Four Seasons in the last nights of 1947, racing a union recording ban?
Carnegie Hall
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.
Q 28Which Italian ensemble first recorded The Four Seasons with Felix Ayo in 1955 and has re-recorded it many times since?
I Musici
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.
Q 29Which London orchestra's Four Seasons with Alan Loveday sold over half a million copies?
Academy of St Martin in the Fields
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.
Q 30Which composer 'recomposed' The Four Seasons in 2012, discarding about three-quarters of Vivaldi's notes?
Max Richter
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.