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Britannica's Publishing Partner Program and our community of experts to gain a global audience for your work! Antonio Vivaldi, in full Antonio Lucio Vivaldi, (born March 4, 1678, Venice, Republic of Venice [Italy]—died July 28, 1741, Vienna, Austria), Italian composer and violinist who left a decisive mark on the form of the concerto and the style of late Baroque instrumental music.
Life
Vivaldi’s main teacher was probably his father, Giovanni Battista, who in 1685 was admitted as a violinist to the orchestra of the San Marco Basilica in Venice. Antonio, the eldest child, trained for the priesthood and was ordained in 1703. His distinctive reddish hair would later earn him the soubriquetIl Prete Rosso (“The Red Priest”). He made his first known public appearance playing alongside his father in the basilica as a “supernumerary” violinist in 1696. He became an excellent violinist, and in 1703 he was appointed violin master at the Ospedale della Pietà, a home for foundlings. The Pietà specialized in the musical training of its female wards, and those with musical aptitude were assigned to its excellent choir and orchestra, whose much-praised performances assisted the institution’s quest for donations and legacies. Vivaldi had dealings with the Pietà for most of his career: as violin master (1703–09; 1711–15), director of instrumental music (1716–17; 1735–38), and paid external supplier of compositions (1723–29; 1739–40).
The Red Priest Composer
Soon after his ordination as a priest, Vivaldi gave up celebrating mass because of a chronic ailment that is believed to have been bronchial asthma. Despite this circumstance, he took his status as a secular priest seriously and even earned the reputation of a religious bigot.
Vivaldi’s earliest musical compositions date from his first years at the Pietà. Printed collections of his trio sonatas and violin sonatas respectively appeared in 1705 and 1709, and in 1711 his first and most influential set of concerti for violin and string orchestra (Opus 3, L’estro armonico) was published by the Amsterdam music-publishing firm of Estienne Roger. In the years up to 1719, Roger published three more collections of his concerti (opuses 4, 6, and 7) and one collection of sonatas (Opus 5).
Vivaldi made his debut as a composer of sacred vocal music in 1713, when the Pietà’s choirmaster left his post and the institution had to turn to Vivaldi and other composers for new compositions. He achieved great success with his sacred vocal music, for which he later received commissions from other institutions. Another new field of endeavour for him opened in 1713 when his first opera, Ottone in villa, was produced in Vicenza. Returning to Venice, Vivaldi immediately plunged into operatic activity in the twin roles of composer and impresario. From 1718 to 1720 he worked in Mantua as director of secular music for that city’s governor, Prince Philip of Hesse-Darmstadt. This was the only full-time post Vivaldi ever held; he seems to have preferred life as a freelance composer for the flexibility and entrepreneurial opportunities it offered. Vivaldi’s major compositions in Mantua were operas, though he also composed cantatas and instrumental works.
The 1720s were the zenith of Vivaldi’s career. Based once more in Venice, but frequently traveling elsewhere, he supplied instrumental music to patrons and customers throughout Europe. Between 1725 and 1729 he entrusted five new collections of concerti (opuses 8–12) to Roger’s publisher successor, Michel-Charles Le Cène. After 1729 Vivaldi stopped publishing his works, finding it more profitable to sell them in manuscript to individual purchasers. During this decade he also received numerous commissions for operas and resumed his activity as an impresario in Venice and other Italian cities.
In 1726 the contralto Anna Girò sang for the first time in a Vivaldi opera. Born in Mantua about 1711, she had gone to Venice to further her career as a singer. Her voice was not strong, but she was attractive and acted well. She became part of Vivaldi’s entourage and the indispensable prima donna of his subsequent operas, causing gossip to circulate that she was Vivaldi’s mistress. After Vivaldi’s death she continued to perform successfully in opera until quitting the stage in 1748 to marry a nobleman.
In the 1730s Vivaldi’s career gradually declined. The French traveler Charles de Brosses reported in 1739 with regret that his music was no longer fashionable. Vivaldi’s impresarial forays became increasingly marked by failure. In 1740 he traveled to Vienna, but he fell ill and did not live to attend the production there of his opera L’oracolo in Messenia in 1742. The simplicity of his funeral on July 28, 1741, suggests that he died in considerable poverty.
After Vivaldi’s death, his huge collection of musical manuscripts, consisting mainly of autograph scores of his own works, was bound into 27 large volumes. These were acquired first by the Venetian bibliophile Jacopo Soranzo and later by Count Giacomo Durazzo, Christoph Willibald Gluck’s patron. Rediscovered in the 1920s, these manuscripts today form part of the Foà and Giordano collections of the National Library in Turin.
- born
- March 4, 1678
Venice, Italy
- died
- July 28, 1741 (aged 63)
Vienna, Austria
- notable works
- movement / style
Vivaldi was known as the Red Priest, for his red hair, hidden under a wig in this anonymous portrait from 1723. (Wikimedia commons: International museum and library of music, Bologne)
If music was a numbers game, this composer would be the undisputed greatest. He wrote a lot of music.
In fact, people who aren’t fans of his describe his music as being 'cookie-cutter' or 'samey.' There’s even the joke that he composed just one concerto, 500 times!
But I want to make a case for Vivaldi as being much more than a purveyor of fluffy concertos. There’s a lot to this composer that is easily missed to our modern ears.
There are two important pieces of information about Vivaldi, which I feel you should know.
Firstly, he suffered from poor health his whole life — we think it was probably chronic asthma. In fact it was touch and go when he was a baby, so much so that when he pulled through, his mother pledged that he would become a priest, and he did. He’s known as the Red Priest, on account of his hair, which was, well, red.
Secondly, Vivaldi lived in an age when music was written either for the Church, or for noblemen and royalty. But Vivaldi, he was teacher, and a great number of his compositions were for his students in an orphanage. Doesn’t that change how you feel about him?
As a priest, Vivaldi wrote many religious works, and during his life, he was best known as a composer of operas, not instrumental works. But his real legacy are his 500 or so instrumental concertos, and maybe it’s Vivaldi’s prowess as an opera composer that is the secret to how affecting they are. He brought drama, excitement and a sense of story to them. They’re dazzling to listen to and performers relish them. They were a great influence on music all over Europe. Bach, for one, was a massive fan.
These concertos champion all sorts of instruments. For example, Vivaldi was the first composer to treat the cello as a serious solo instrument. But the vast majority are for his own instrument, the violin. They demonstrate new exciting sounds. And they evoke the whole compass of existence, from the beauty of nature to great Moghuls from the East.
Which Composer Was Known As The Red Priest
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It’s a set of four concertos that he wrote whilst living in Mantua that really captured the ears of the world — the concertos that became known as The Four Seasons. As you listen, hearing insects buzzing, crashing storms, peasant songs and frozen winter fields, consider this: Vivaldi was the first composer to use music to depict the world around us in such vivid detail.
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But all of Vivaldi’s concertos, they have such a consistent energy, brightness, vitality. Such brilliance from the Red Priest.
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