Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741)
- Concerti (in Fa maggiore) per due Corni dà Caccia (c.1730), RV 538
Performers: Michael Thompson (horn); Richard Watkins (horn); Philharmonia Orchestra;
Christopher Warren-Green (conductor)
Further info: Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) - Chamber Concertos
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Italian violinist and composer. He was born the eldest of nine children
of Giovanni Battista Vivaldi (1655-1736), a violinist at Basilica San
Marco in Venice. He took the tonsure on 18 September 1693, trained for
the Roman Catholic priesthood, and was ordained on 23 March 1703.
However, a condition that Vivaldi himself described as strettezza di
petto (“tightness of the chest”), probably bronchial asthma, had the
curious effect of preventing his celebrating the mass from 1706 onward
yet allowing his extensive teaching, publishing, and traveling about
Italy to oversee his operatic productions. While training for the
priesthood, he probably learned the fundamentals of violin from his
father and occasionally substituted for him at San Marco. Son Antonio’s
performance as an extra violinist at the basilica for Christmas 1696 is
his first documented public appearance. Thereafter, he developed into a
violinist of international reputation, with technical capacities that
founded much of the innovation of his solo violin concertos. Vivaldi’s
income as a musician came from three different kinds of activity, which
constantly intertwine chronologically: as a salaried violin teacher at
the famous Pio Ospedale at the Pietà, as an independent opera composer
and impresario, and as a composer of instrumental publications for sale.
He was appointed master of violin teaching della Pieta in 1703 by
Francesco Gasparini, and his intermittent and at times tumultuous
relationship with the governors of the Pietà would last until nearly the
end of his life. His duties included teaching the young girls on
various string instruments, maintaining the instruments, directing
ensembles, and composing music for them.
In April 1718, he did not apply for reappointment at the Pietà, perhaps
because he had been invited to Mantua to compose operas. From 1723 to
1729, Vivaldi composed about 140 concertos for the Pietà on commission
and rehearsed them with the girls when he was in Venice. The governors
hired him again, this time as maestro di cappella in 1735 but, tiring of
his many travels, dismissed him in March 1738. The last transaction
between Vivaldi and the Pietà was the sale of 20 concertos in May 1740.
His earliest known opera, Ottone in Villa, opened in the city of Vicenza
in May 1713. Thereafter, he was associated with the public theater at
Sant’ Angelo in Venice. The Hapsburg governor of Mantua, Prince Phillip
of Hesse-Darmstadt, appointed him maestro di cappella di camera. From
1733 to 1735, he composed operas for the Teatro Sant’ Angelo and for
another Venetian venue, Teatro San Samuele, working with the brilliant
young Venetian poet Carlo Goldoni (1707–1793). He was offered a chance
to compose operas for the Carnivals of 1737, 1738, and 1739 in Ferrara,
but the Archbishop Tommaso Cardinal Ruffo forbad Vivaldi to enter the
city, possibly on account of Anna Girò. A chance to perform at Vienna’s
Kärntnertortheater seems to have inspired Vivaldi’s last journey in
1740, but the death of Emperor Charles VI in October shut down all the
theaters throughout the Carnival period of 1741. Vivaldi stayed on,
perhaps too sick or poor to return to Venice. His last documented
professional act was the sale of some concertos to one Count Antonio
Vinciguerra of Collalto. On 27 or 28 July, he died and was buried as a
pauper in the Spittaler Gottsacker, a hospital burial ground in Vienna.
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