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Antonio Vivaldi
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Antonio Vivaldi (born Venice, 4 March 1678; died Vienna, 28 July 1741) was an Italian composer. He was the most important composer in Italy at the end of the Baroque period. He wrote more than 400 concertos for various instruments, especially for the violin. He taught at a school for orphaned girls. The music education there was very good and Vivaldi wrote a lot of his music for his pupils to play. His most popular work is the group of four violin concertos called “The Four Seasons”.
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Antonio Vivaldi is a composer of the late Baroque period, born in 1678. As a newborn his health was poor and he was immediately baptized in order to ensure his place in heaven if he died. Health issues would plague him for most of his life, which for the time period was actually fairly long. He lived until 1741, dying a few months after his 61st birthday.
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LEAD: The prolific Antonio Vivaldi has always had detractors who believe the old joke about his having written one concerto 500 times. And now that classical radio stations are using Baroque music as all-purpose aural wallpaper, the composer's advocates find it even harder to persuade unreconstructed Romanticists that there is more to this music than pretty figuration.
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In 1718, Antonio Vivaldi traveled to Mantua with his new opera, Armida al campo d'Egitto, where he stayed until 1720. He composed sevreal operas, cantatas, and serenatas for the Mantuan court. Antonio Vivaldi was given the title maestro di cappella da camera by the Governor. After leaving Mantua, Vivaldi traveled to Rome where he performed for the Pope and composed and performed new operas. Antonio Vivaldi made a deal with the Pietà and supplied them with 140 concertos between 1723 and 1729.
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Long famous throughout Europe as a composer and violinist, Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) lost his public during the last decade of his life. Hespent his final days in penury and, likeMozart afterhim, was buried in a pauper's grave, his scores seemingly doomed to obsurity. Infact, more than 200 years passed before musicians made the first sustained attempt of reviving the composer's works. Beforethe late 1940's, and even at that time, musicologists would have scoffed at the suggestion that Vivaldi could ever again attain best-seller status. Yet,by the mid-1960's, Vivaldi's music had, withstorybook rapidity, regained the kind of widespread admiration and adoration it had last known in the 1720's.
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The creator of hundreds of spirited, extroverted instrumental works, Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi is widely recognized as the master of the Baroque instrumental concerto, which he perfected and popularized more than any of his contemporaries. Vivaldi's kinetic rhythms, fluid melodies, bright instrumental effects, and extensions of instrumental technique make his some of the most enjoyable of Baroque music. He was highly influential among his contemporaries and successors: even as esteemed a figure as Johann Sebastian Bach adapted some of Vivaldi's music. Vivaldi's variable textures and dramatic effects initiated the shift toward what became the Classical style; a deeper understanding of his music begins with the realization that, compared with Bach and even Handel, he was Baroque music's arch progressive. Though not as familiar as his concerti, Vivaldi's stage and choral music is still of value; his sometimes bouncy, sometimes lyrical Gloria in D major (1708) has remained a perennial favorite. His operas were widely performed in his own time.
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Antonio Vivaldi