__NOTOC__ Year 589 (DLXXXIX) was a common year starting on Saturday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. The denomination 589 for this year has been used since the early medieval period, when the Anno Domini calendar era became the prevalent method in Europe for naming years.

Events

By place

Europe

October 17—The Adige River overflows its banks, flooding the church of St. Zeno and damaging the walls of Verona.

The plague hits Rome, and its victims included Pope Pelagius II.

Asia

China: The Chen Dynasty ends; Jiankang (Nanjing), the last of the Southern dynasties, is completely destroyed; China is reunited under the Sui Dynasty.

The Chinese scholar-official Yan Zhitui makes the first reference to the use of toilet paper in human history.

By topic

Religion

The Third Council of Toledo, called by King Reccared of the Visigoths, renounces Arianism and embraces Catholicism.

The Council of Narbonne is held.

Births

Bavo, Catholic and Eastern Orthodox saint

Li Jiancheng

Deaths

1 March—Saint David, the patron saint of Wales

Emperor Sushun, emperor of Japan

Consort Zhang Lihua

Antonio Lucio Vivaldi (March 4, 1678 – July 28, 1741), nicknamed ("The Red Priest"), was an Italian Baroque composer, priest, and virtuoso violinist, born in Venice. Vivaldi is recognized as one of the greatest Baroque composers, and his influence during his lifetime was widespread over Europe. Vivaldi is known mainly for composing instrumental concertos, especially for the violin, as well as sacred choral works and over 40 operas. His best known work is a series of violin concertos known as The Four Seasons.

Many of his compositions were written for the female music ensemble of the Ospedale della Pietà, an orphanage for poor and illegitimate children where Vivaldi worked between 1703 and 1740. Vivaldi also had some success with stagings of his operas in Venice, Mantua and Vienna. After meeting the Emperor Charles VI, Vivaldi moved to Vienna hoping for preferment. The Emperor died soon after Vivaldi's arrival, and the composer died a pauper, without a steady source of income.

Though Vivaldi's music was well received during his lifetime, it later declined in popularity until its vigorous revival in the first half of the 20th century. Today, Vivaldi ranks among the most popular and widely recorded Baroque composers.

Childhood

Antonio Lucio Vivaldi was born in Venice, the capital of the Republic of Venice in 1678. He was baptized immediately after his birth at his home by the midwife, which led to the belief that his life was somehow in danger. Though not known for certain, the immediate baptism was most likely due either to his poor health or to an earthquake that shook the city that day. In the trauma of the earthquake, Vivaldi's mother may have dedicated him to the priesthood. This did not prevent him from learning to play the violin, composing or taking part in musical activities, although it did stop him from playing wind instruments. In 1693, at the age of 15, he began studying to become a priest. He became responsible for all of the musical activity of the institution In 1709, a second collection of 12 sonatas for violin and basso continuo appeared, his Opus 2. Vivaldi got the censor to accept the opera the following year, and it was a resounding success.

At this period, the Pietà commissioned several liturgical works. The most important were two oratorios. Moyses Deus Pharaonis, (RV 643) is lost. The second, Juditha triumphans (RV 644), celebrates the victory of the Republic of Venice against the Turks and the recapture of the island of Corfù. Composed in 1716, it is one of his sacred masterpieces. All eleven singing parts were performed by girls of the Pietà, both the female and male roles. Many of the arias include parts for solo instruments—recorders, oboes, clarinets, violas d'amore, and mandolins—that showcased the range of talents of the girls.

Mantua and The Four Seasons

In 1717 or 1718, Vivaldi was offered a new prestigious position as Maestro di Cappella of the court of prince Philip of Hesse-Darmstadt, governor of Mantua. He moved there for three years and produced several operas, among which was Tito Manlio (RV 738). In 1721, he was in Milan, where he presented the pastoral drama La Silvia (RV 734, 9 arias survive). He visited Milan again the following year with the oratorio L'adorazione delli tre re magi al bambino Gesù (RV 645, also lost). In 1722 he moved to Rome, where he introduced his operas' new style. The new pope Benedict XIII invited Vivaldi to play for him. In 1725, Vivaldi returned to Venice, where he produced four operas in the same year.

During this period Vivaldi wrote the Four Seasons, four violin concertos depicting scenes appropriate for each season. Three of the concerti are of original conception, while the first, "Spring", borrows motifs from a Sinfonia in the first act of his contemporaneous opera "Il Giustino". The inspiration for the concertos was probably the countryside around Mantua. They were a revolution in musical conception: in them Vivaldi represented flowing creeks, singing birds (of different species, each specifically characterized), barking dogs, buzzing mosquitoes, crying shepherds, storms, drunken dancers, silent nights, hunting parties from both the hunters' and the prey's point of view, frozen landscapes, ice-skating children, and warming winter fires. Each concerto is associated with a sonnet, possibly by Vivaldi, describing the scenes depicted in the music. They were published as the first four concertos in a collection of twelve, Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione, Opus 8, published in Amsterdam by Le Cène in 1725.

During his time in Mantua, Vivaldi became acquainted with an aspiring young singer Anna Tessieri Giro who was to become his student, protégée, and favorite prima donna. Anna, along with her older half-sister Paolina, became part of Vivaldi's entourage and regularly accompanied him on his many travels. There was speculation about the nature of Vivaldi's and Giro's relationship, but no evidence to indicate anything beyond friendship and professional collaboration. Although Vivaldi's relationship with Anna Giro was questioned, he adamantly denied any romantic relationship in a letter to his patron Bentivoglio dated November 16, 1737.

Later life and death

During the height of his career, Vivaldi received commissions from European nobility and royalty. The wedding cantata Gloria e Imeneo (RV 687) was written for the marriage of Louis XV. Vivaldi's Opus 9, La Cetra, was dedicated to Emperor Charles VI. In 1728, Vivaldi met the emperor while he was visiting Trieste to oversee the construction of a new port. Charles admired the music of the Red Priest so much that he is said to have spoken more with the composer during their one meeting than he spoke to his ministers in over two years. He gave Vivaldi the title of knight, a gold medal and an invitation to Vienna. Vivaldi gave Charles a manuscript copy of La Cetra, a set of concerti almost completely different from the set of the same title published as Opus 9. The printing was probably delayed, forcing Vivaldi to gather an improvised collection for the emperor.

Accompanied by his father, Vivaldi traveled to Vienna and Prague in 1730, where his opera Farnace (RV 711) was presented. Some of his later operas were created in collaboration with two of Italy's major writers of the time. L'Olimpiade and Catone in Utica were written by Pietro Metastasio, the major representative of the Arcadian movement and court poet in Vienna. La Griselda was rewritten by the young Carlo Goldoni from an earlier libretto by Apostolo Zeno.

Like many composers of the time, the final years of Vivaldi's life found him in financial difficulties. His compositions were no longer held in such high esteem as they once were in Venice; changing musical tastes quickly made them outmoded. In response, Vivaldi chose to sell off sizeable numbers of his manuscripts at paltry prices to finance his migration to Vienna. The reasons for Vivaldi's departure from Venice are unclear, but it seems likely that, after the success of his meeting with Emperor Charles VI, he wished to take up the position of a composer in the imperial court. On his way to Vienna, Vivaldi may have stopped in Graz to see Anna Giro. It is also likely that Vivaldi went to Vienna to stage operas, especially since he took up residence near the Kärntnertortheater. Shortly after Vivaldi's arrival in Vienna, Charles VI died, a stroke of bad luck that left the composer without royal protection or a steady source of income. Vivaldi died a pauper not long after the emperor, on the night between July 27 and 28, 1741 at the age of 63, of "internal infection", in a house owned by the widow of a Viennese saddlemaker. On July 28 he was buried in a simple grave at the Hospital Burial Ground in Vienna. Vivaldi's funeral took place at St. Stephen's Cathedral, where the young Joseph Haydn was then a choir boy. The cost of his funeral included a Kleingeläut (pauper's peal of bells). He was buried next to Karlskirche, in an area now part of the site of the Technical Institute. The house Vivaldi lived in while in Vienna was torn down; the Hotel Sacher is built on part of the site. Memorial plaques have been placed at both locations as well as a Vivaldi "star" in the Viennese Musikmeile and a monument at the Rooseveltplatz.

Only three portraits of Vivaldi are known to survive: an engraving, an ink sketch and an oil painting. The engraving, by Francois Morellon La Cave, was made in 1725 and shows Vivaldi holding a sheet of music. The ink sketch was done by Ghezzi in 1723 and shows only Vivaldi's head and shoulders in profile. The oil painting found in the Liceo Musicale of Bologna gives us possibly the most accurate picture and shows Vivaldi's red hair under his blond wig.

Style and influence

Vivaldi's music was innovative. He brightened the formal and rhythmic structure of the concerto, in which he looked for harmonic contrasts and innovative melodies and themes; many of his compositions are flamboyantly, almost playfully, exuberant.

Johann Sebastian Bach was deeply influenced by Vivaldi's concertos and arias (recalled in his St John Passion, St Matthew Passion, and cantatas). Bach transcribed six of Vivaldi's concerti for solo keyboard, three for organ, and one for four harpsichords, strings, and basso continuo (BWV 1065) based upon the concerto for four violins, two violas, cello, and basso continuo (RV 580).

Posthumous reputation

During his lifetime, Vivaldi's popularity quickly made him famous in other countries, including France where musical taste was less dictated by fashion than elsewhere. This popularity dwindled. After the Baroque period, Vivaldi's published concerti were relatively unknown, and largely ignored, even after Felix Mendelssohn rekindled interest in Bach. Even Vivaldi's most famous work, The Four Seasons, was unknown in its original edition.

In the early 20th century, Fritz Kreisler's Vivaldi-styled concerto (which he passed off as an original Vivaldi work) helped revive Vivaldi's reputation. This impelled the French scholar Marc Pincherle to begin an academic study of Vivaldi's oeuvre. Many Vivaldi manuscripts were rediscovered, and were acquired by the National University of Turin Library with generous sponsorship of Turinese businessmen Roberto Foa and Filippo Giordano, in memory of their sons. This led to renewed interest in Vivaldi by, among others, Mario Rinaldi, Alfredo Casella, Ezra Pound, Olga Rudge, Desmond Chute, Arturo Toscanini, Arnold Schering, and Louis Kaufman. These figures were instrumental in the Vivaldi revival of the 20th century.

In 1926, in a monastery in Piedmont, researchers discovered 14 folios of Vivaldi's work, previously thought lost during the Napoleonic wars. Some volumes in the numbered set were missing; these turned up in the collections of the descendants of the Grand Duke Durazzo who had acquired the monastery complex in the 18th century. The volumes contained 300 concertos, 19 operas and over 100 vocal-instrumental works.

The resurrection of Vivaldi's unpublished works in the 20th century is mostly due to the efforts of Alfredo Casella, who in 1939 organised the historic Vivaldi Week, in which the rediscovered Gloria (RV 589) and l'Olimpiade were first revived. Since World War II, Vivaldi's compositions have enjoyed wide success. In 1947, the Venetian businessman Antonio Fanna founded the Istituto Italiano Antonio Vivaldi, with the composer Gian Francesco Malipiero as its artistic director, having the purpose of promoting Vivaldi's music and publishing new editions of his works. Historically informed performances seem to have increased Vivaldi's fame further. Unlike many of his contemporaries, whose music is rarely heard outside an academic or special-interest context, Vivaldi is popular among modern audiences.

Recent rediscoveries of works by Vivaldi include two psalm settings of Nisi Dominus (RV 803, in eight movements) and Dixit Dominus (RV 807, in eleven movements), identified in 2003 and 2005, respectively, by the Australian scholar Janice Stockigt. Vivaldi scholar Michael Talbot called RV 803 "arguably the best nonoperatic work from Vivaldi's pen to come to light since... the 1920s". Vivaldi's lost 1730 opera Argippo (RV 697) was re-discovered in 2006 by harpsichordist and conductor Ondřej Macek, whose Hofmusici orchestra performed the work at Prague Castle on May 3, 2008, its first performance since 1730.

A movie titled Vivaldi, a Prince in Venice was completed in 2005 as an Italian-French co-production under the direction of Jean-Louis Guillermou, featuring Stefano Dionisi in the title role and Michel Serrault as the bishop of Venice. Another film inspired by the life of the composer was in a preproduction state for several years and has the working title Vivaldi. Filming was scheduled to begin in 2007, but was canceled and tentatively rescheduled for 2009.

The music of Vivaldi, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, and Corelli, has been included in the theories of Alfred Tomatis on the effects of music on human behaviour and used in music therapy.

Works

A Vivaldi work is identified by RV number, which refers to its place in the "Ryom-Verzeichnis" or "Répertoire des oeuvres d'Antonio Vivaldi", a catalog created in the 20th century by musicologist Peter Ryom.

Le quattro stagioni (The Four Seasons) of 1723 is his most famous work. It is part of Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione ("The Contest between Harmony and Invention"). It depicts moods and scenes from each of the four seasons. This work has been described as an outstanding instance of pre-19th Century program music.

Vivaldi wrote more than 500 other concertos. About 350 of these are for solo instrument and strings, of which 230 are for violin, the others being for bassoon, cello, oboe, flute, viola d'amore, recorder, lute, or mandolin. About 40 are for two instruments and strings, and about 30 are for three or more instruments and strings.

As well as about 46 operas, Vivaldi composed a large body of sacred choral music. Other works include sinfonias, about 90 sonatas, and chamber music.

Some sonatas for flute, published as Il Pastor Fido, have been erroneously attributed to Vivaldi, but were composed by Nicolas Chédeville.

Notes

References and further reading

Bukofzer, Manfred (1947). Music in the Baroque Era. New York, W. W. Norton & Co. ISBN 0-393-09745-5.

Cross, Eric (1984). Review of I libretti vivaldiani: recensione e collazione dei testimoni a stampa by Anna Laura Bellina; Bruno Brizi; Maria Grazia Pensa in Music & Letters, Vol. 65, No. 1 (Jan., 1984), pp. 62–64

Formichetti, Gianfranco Venezia e il prete col violino. Vita di Antonio Vivaldi, Bompiani (2006), ISBN 88-452-5640-5.

Heller, Karl Antonio Vivaldi: The Red Priest of Venice, Amadeus Press (1997), ISBN 1-57467-015-8

Kolneder, Walter Antonio Vivaldi: Documents of His Life and Works, C F Peters Corp (1983), ISBN 3-7959-0338-6

Barbara Quick, Vivaldi's Virgins (novel), HarperCollins (2007), ISBN 978-0-06-089052-0.

André Romijn. Hidden Harmonies: The Secret Life of Antonio Vivaldi, 2007 ISBN 978-0-9554100-1-7

Eleanor Selfridge-Field (1994). Venetian Instrumental Music, from Gabrieli to Vivaldi. New York, Dover Publications. ISBN 0-486-28151-5.

Michael Talbot, Antonio Vivaldi, Insel Verlag (1998), ISBN 3-458-33917-5

Michael Talbot: "Antonio Vivaldi", Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy (Accessed August 26, 2006), (subscription access)

Vivaldi: Voice of the Baroque, H. C. Robbins Landon, 1996 University of Chicago Press, ISBN 0226468429

Sarah Bruce Kelly: The Red Priest's Annina, 2009 Bel Canto Press, ISBN 978-0-578-02566-7

External links

Catalog of instrumental works

Complete works catalog

Michael Talbot: Recent Vivaldi Discoveries from the online magazine Goldberg.

Antonio Vivaldi by Fréderic Délaméa (Translated by Kirk McElhearn) from Goldberg.

Two Vivaldi biopics may duel at the box office

Vivaldi biography. Free English eBooks: 1. Talbot, M. Vivaldi. 1993; 2. Heller, K. Antonio Vivaldi: The Red Priest of Venice. 1997

project Anima Veneziana (Ryom, Peter. Vivaldi Werkverzeichnis. 1. Auflage. 2007. Breitkopf & Härtel. 664 S., format: JPG)

The Seasons in interactive hypermedia Allegro, Largo, Allegro (Shockwave required) at the BinAural Collaborative Hypertext

Video of ballet to music by Antonio Vivaldi

Informations about the research project on the Saxon court's instrumental music collection in the Sächsische Landesbibliothek - Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden, in German (open source online publication of all Vivaldi manuscripts from the Pisendel collection)

Category:1678 births Category:1741 deaths Category:Baroque composers Category:Composers for cello Category:Composers for violin Category:Italian composers Category:Italian classical violinists Category:Italian Roman Catholic priests Category:Opera composers Category:People from Venice (city)