Read on to discover how Vivaldi's Four Seasons became one of the world's most popular and recognisable classical works...
Vivaldi's Four Seasons... a cultural phenomenon
Late one evening when I was in the middle of writing this article, I was standing by my local bus stop checking my phone for the next arrival time. In a scene all too common these days, a cyclist swooped by me, snatched the phone, and was gone in an instant. More irritated than angry, I went home to report the theft and got on the landline to my service provider. And lo and behold, as I was on hold, there came the soothingly cheerful sounds of ‘Spring’ from Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. It was difficult not to feel cheered by the coincidence. And then, just the other day, as Season 2 of the excellent Netflix series The Diplomat launched, there was the Vivaldi again, ushering us into a glamorous ambassadorial reception at Blenheim Palace.
This just reinforces what we have known for some time: that in myriad different ways, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons have become one of the most usable, recyclable, familiar and popular classical music works of the age. And their attraction cannot be based entirely on the poetry which is attached to them, nor to their programmatic content (which doesn’t get recited while you are on hold). The four concertos are brilliant, punchy, upbeat, concise pieces of music, each with three movements lasting a few minutes each. In this, they are music for our time – for an era of short attention spans, seemingly designed for those not yet into the full-scale concertos of Brahms or Rachmaninov, offering refreshing bursts of attractively energetic music-making.
Vivaldi's Four Seasons... a modern revival
Yet this does not quite explain the phenomenon of the Seasons, and it is worth trying to retrace the modern revival of these remarkable concertos to observe their ever-growing hold on listeners. One interesting context is that in terms of the revival of Baroque music in the 20th century, Vivaldi was comparatively late to the field. Bach and Handel, even Purcell and Monteverdi, were better established before Vivaldi came into the picture. (In the early days of the revival it was through JS Bach’s use of Vivaldi’s music in organ and keyboard transcriptions, and in one later concerto for four harpsichords, that Vivaldi’s music was known.) I have a helpful advert from my local hi-fi shop, vintage c1974, which asks, ‘Overwhelmed by the 20-odd versions of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons?’ Well now, when all violinists (and many other instrumentalists) aspire to record these pieces, we must be many times that total.
The path to popularity...
The discovery of Vivaldi's autograph scores
The Four Seasons had been published in 1725 by Michel-Charles La Cène of Amsterdam as the first four concertos of Vivaldi’s Op. 8, and so prints of these concertos were in theory available, though they were very rare: there is one complete copy in Paris. Apparently, a piano duet version was published in 1919. As interest in Vivaldi grew through discoveries of the 1920s, the enterprising violinist Bernardino Molinari edited the Seasons in what scholar Paul Everett has described as the ‘tradition of less-than-faithful transcription that persisted in the house style of Ricordi of Milan’, published in 1927.
Molinari then made the first ever recording of this unreliable edition in 1942. The context for this is that Vivaldi’s own autograph scores were relatively unknown until scholars began to unearth them in the 1920s. In a famous discovery, in 1926 a large number of his scores were located at the San Carlo Salesian Monastery in Monferrato near Turin. They were sent for inspection to Alberto Gentili, professor of musicology at the University of Turin, who established that the find indeed included many Vivaldi autograph manuscripts.
A tortuous route to revival
Where had they come from? By a variety of routes, Vivaldi’s own collection of scores had been passed on, divided and sold, and by the end of the 18th century one collection was in the hands of Count Giacomo Durazzo, who had been the Viennese ambassador to Venice from 1764-84; on his death in 1794, the collection moved to the Durazzo family villa in Genoa, and a century later was divided between two Durazzo brothers. It was Marcello Durazzo who on his death in 1922 left his part of the collection to the monks in Monferrato.
The tortuous route to widespread revival was a struggle, because when Gentili and his scholars found the heir of Marcello Durazzo, his nephew Giuseppe Maria Durazzo, he turned out to be what the Vivaldi biographer Walter Kolneder describes as ‘a whimsical and unsociable old man’, furious with the monks for having let others look at the family collection. After long negotiation and the discovery of another cache of concertos, united in the collection in Turin in 1930, the Durazzo heir played his final hand in the saga: he insisted that though the manuscripts could be studied, no publications or performances were to be allowed. It took ‘protracted proceedings in the civil and ecclesiastical courts’ to overturn this ludicrous prohibition.
It was not until 1939 that, after much editing work by Alfredo Casella, a Vivaldi week was mounted in Siena, which was noted in The Times – from which late moment the modern Vivaldi revival can really be dated. Bear in mind that, by then, Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos had been recorded, Handel oratorios performed and Monteverdi opera revived. Vivaldi had quite some ground to make up.
Finally... a modern revival
The Four Seasons concertos took quite some while to take hold, and perhaps their unique quality was not initially recognised. Even though there was a trickle of recordings of other Vivaldi concertos in the 1930s and ’40s under such luminaries as conductors Leopold Stokowski and Serge Koussevitzky (Op. 3 No. 11), and Willem Mengelberg (Op. 3 No. 8), as well as sonatas with violinists Jascha Heifetz and Nathan Milstein, they did not include the Seasons.
Following Molinari’s pioneering effort, the most entertaining account of their modern revival is provided by the violinist Louis Kaufman, a veteran of the movie score scene in the US, in his autobiography A Fiddler’s Tale: How Hollywood and Vivaldi Discovered Me. Here we read of the rush to record the Seasons in Carnegie Hall at the dead of night in the middle of a snowstorm (through which the harpsichord for the sessions had to be transported!) until 4am on 31 December 1947, before the deadline for a musicians’ strike descended the next day: ‘As the hours sped by on the brilliantly lit stage of the darkened auditorium, our attention never flagged and our excitement increased… we returned to our hotel about six o’clock… emotionally and physically exhausted, with the melodies and captivating rhythms of Vivaldi dancing through our minds’.
Vivaldi's Four Seasons... a rush of new recordings
This was just the start of a revival that from then gathered increasing momentum: several decisive recordings in good editions were by the Italian ensemble I Musici, starting in the 1950s, then mainstream orchestras such as the New York Philharmonic joined in, with Leonard Bernstein conducting concertmaster John Corigliano (father of the contemporary composer) in 1963 and, probably the first in the UK, Stokowski conducting the Philharmonia with Hugh Bean in 1966.
The superbly disciplined Academy of St Martin in the Fields recorded the concertos with Alan Loveday in 1970, a breakthrough version here. Then the Baroque period-instrument bands took them up: Trevor Pinnock’s English Concert with Simon Standage, and Christopher Hogwood’s Academy of Ancient Music with four different soloists, both recorded them in 1982. Meanwhile, the glamorous quartet of Isaac Stern, Pinchas Zukerman, Shlomo Mintz and Itzhak Perlman shared the honours with Zubin Mehta and the Israel Philharmonic.
Then, of course, in 1989 Nigel Kennedy, an unconventional and brilliant violinist marketed to the hilt alongside the products of pop culture, pushed the revival into a whole new realm of public awareness: as EMI describes it, his recording was ‘a phenomenon waiting to happen’, which sold 3 million copies around the world and was claimed as the best-selling classical music recording ever.
The art of descriptive music...
The tradition of instrumental music evoking nature, moods and specific events is a long-standing one: Vivaldi wrote plenty of concertos with such descriptive titles, especially in the decades from 1710-30: ‘La caccia’ (the hunt), ‘La notte’ (night), ‘La tempesta di mare’ (the storm at sea), ‘The Cuckoo’, ‘La Pastorella’ (the shepherdess), ‘The Goldfinch’, plus more generic studies of suspicion, anxiety and rest. These titles surely both stimulated his imagination and helped sell the meaning of the works to the public.
There are precedents for this kind of illustration of nature – in my old copy of the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book there is a keyboard fantasia by John Munday (or Mundy) in the late-16th century which juxtaposes sections titled ‘Faire Wether’, ‘Lightning’, ‘Thunder’, ‘Calm Wether’, and finally ‘A cleare Day’. A different kind of illustration is employed in Johann Froberger’s 17th-century keyboard Lament on the death of Ferdinand IV, where the final line depicts his (hoped-for) ascent to heaven high about the stave.
An instrumental example, now well-known from the period-instrument revival, is Biber’s Battalia, with its blustering, vivid narrative of marching, drunken singing, battle and lament for the fallen. Biber’s Rosary Sonatas for violin are also closely linked to the mysteries of the rosary depicted in accompanying illustrations. Perhaps a closer analogy to Vivaldi is Bach’s predecessor at Leipzig, Kuhnau, whose harpsichord Biblical Sonatas tell Old Testament stories including familiar chorales.
Vivaldi's Four Seasons... the first programme music?
The Seasons, however, take this descriptive intent a critical stage further: they are fully-fledged programme music, with poems attached that explain exactly what is being illustrated. There is one important clue as to how seriously Vivaldi took the representation of precise events and sounds in these concertos: when they were published in 1725, he was not content to include the poems (which he quite possibly wrote himself), but included extra cues inserted in the score. This, he explained to the dedicatee in his preface (Wenzel, Count Morzin, who had clearly heard earlier versions of these pieces before and favoured them), ensured that the music was published ‘not only with the Sonnets but with a clear description of everything pictured in them’.
Spring
So, in ‘Spring’, the cue at the opening depicts the arrival of the season, soloists then enter with the ‘happy song’ of the birds, thunder and lightning interrupt them, and the birds ‘return once more to their melodious song’. In the second movement, the listener can hear that the intrusive viola notes picture the shepherd’s trusty dog barking while the violins’ rocking figure portrays the ‘pleasant, flowery meadow’. And in the last movement we are pointed by the cue letter to the festive sound of the ‘shepherd’s bagpipe’ as a reason for the drone-like effect of the country dance music.
Summer
The first movement of each concerto is typically more varied in its programme than the central one: in ‘Summer’ we have men ‘languishing in the summer heat’, the sounds of the cuckoo, dove and goldfinch, the gentle south wind and violent north wind, building to a terrific climax; whereas the central movement is just about the furious storm of flies, while the finale is a thrilling depiction of the violent summer weather – again, added descriptions in the score make all this clear.
Autumn
The remaining two concertos take an analogous approach. ‘Autumn’ describes the revelling of the peasants, while the central movement simply snoozily depicts their drunken sleep; the bouncy chase then wakes them up.
Winter
‘Winter’ provides a superb climactic (and climatic) conclusion, as the frozen shivering and chattering teeth of the opening is followed by a surprisingly eloquent rainstorm (a dreamy solo over pizzicato downpours in the violins) and a celebration of the joy of winter.
Programme music's popularity grows
This is all superb storytelling in music, and there is no clear precedent for such a clear and precise matching of sounds to the programme. As time went on, programme music became ever more significant as an instrumental genre, even in lofty abstract forms like the symphony, where three of Haydn’s earliest essays depicted ‘Le Matin’, ‘Le Midi’ and ‘Le Soir’; Beethoven reflected the storms and revels of the countryside in his ‘characteristic’ symphony, the ‘Pastoral’ No. 6; and eventually Richard Strauss ascended to the summit of an overbearingly large orchestra in his An Alpine Symphony.
But it was Vivaldi who led the way with his sophistication of detail, and the overwhelming success of the Seasons is surely down to the fact that, while the poems are no great masterpieces, the music works totally in its own right. The vivid nature-portraits of the Four Seasons can be followed in all their detail… or just listened to on the end of a phone call.