The+Four+Seasons

media type="custom" key="23896918" media type="custom" key="23907920" This video features Italian violinist Federico Agostini as the soloist.
 * Spring, movement 1, of the Four Seasons**
 * Summer, movement 3, of the Four Seasons**

"Like those other seismic cultural milestones, Vivaldi’s most popular concertos also changed the course of musical history. They might not have provoked a riot, but when the Four Seasons were first heard in the early 1720s, their audience hadn’t heard anything quite like them before.

And it wasn’t just the concert-going folk of northern Italy who experienced Vivaldi’s stylistic shot-in-the-arm. The Four Seasons had the theorists frothing too. In these seemingly polite and pretty works, the composer opened a philosophical can of worms that continued to brim over with wriggling controversies for centuries.

The crux of the issue was musical ‘description’. If you’ve ever wondered how on earth a composer can describe specific human interactions or states of mind in an orchestral work without recourse to setting words, then you’re thinking on the very same quandary that was occupying the sizeable brain of Antonio Vivaldi in the early 1720s.

Vivaldi was working in Mantua, and had already written dozens of violin concertos prompted by the fact that he was probably the best violinist on the planet. But he was itching to explore something more: the depiction of particular landscapes and scenes (in this case, the earth’s cycle of seasons) in music that would also convey specifics of human behaviour. All the while, the concerto form – one soloist playing opposite a bigger ensemble – would be preserved.

Vivaldi had set himself quite a challenge, but he’d also hit upon an idea that a lot of music theorists didn’t like. So-called ‘programme music’ existed before, but it was seen by some as inferior and regressive. Vivaldi was determined to prove that descriptive music could be sophisticated, intricate and virtuosic enough to be taken seriously – and that it could advance the cause of the concerto at the same time. With his unequalled gift for orchestral colour and melody, if anyone could do it, Vivaldi could.

So did he succeed? Yes and no. With his elevation of descriptive music Vivaldi ignited a debate that lasted for centuries, and saw the art of telling stories through wordless sounds criticised by those who believed music should transcend earthly description. Programme music hasn’t exactly been welcomed into composition’s hallowed sanctuary with open arms, despite the best efforts of Haydn, Beethoven and Richard Strauss. Where Vivaldi undeniably did succeed was in his successful exploration of compositional techniques – those that made the Four Seasons so enchanting on the ear and so influential on other composers.

The structural thinking behind the Four Seasons was that each movement – twelve in all (three per season) – would establish a certain mood, against which narrative events could then play out. When it came to the detail of those occurrences – barking dogs, drunken dancers, buzzing insects – Vivaldi delivered elegance and originality where other composers had barely moved beyond crude animal-noise clichés. Just listen, in the final movement of ‘Winter’, for Vivaldi’s portrayal of a man skidding across ice using descending octaves on the second violins and violas. In the same concerto the soloist and lower strings conjure what one Vivaldi expert has called ‘fireside warmth’ while violins depict icy rain falling outside.

Added to that are Vivaldi’s verbal instructions to the players. In ‘Spring’ he asks the solo violin to play like ‘il capraro che dorme’ (the sleeping goatherd) and the viola like ‘il cane che grida’ (the barking dog). No wonder musicians talk of the intense imagination and character required to bring these concertos off. Those musicians have never lost their appetite for a rapid ramble through the earth’s meteorological cycle courtesy of Vivaldi’s seasons."

Vivaldi The secret behind the Four Seasons. (n.d.). Sinfini Music. Retrieved April 22, 2014, from http://sinfinimusic.com/uk/features/other-features/the-four-seasons