Antonio Vivaldi

Vivaldi's influence on the development of Baroque music was immense, igniting transformations in music for the church, the opera house, and the concert hall. But his most important achievement was in his music for strings. He introduced a range of new styles and techniques to string playing and consolidated one of its most important genres: the concerto. Becoming a model for his contemporaries, Vivaldi injected the concerto with a remarkable variety of structure, originality of scoring, and imagination of conception, making the form one of the most important in 18th century Europe. His innovations helped to propel the early Classical style and some even credit him as a precursor of musical Romanticism. Vivaldi played the violin from an early age, most likely taking lessons with his father. He trained for the priesthood and was ordained in 1703, his red hair earning him the nickname "il prete rosso" (the red priest). In the same year, he was appointed to the Ospedale della Pietà, a Venetian convent for orphaned or illegitimate girls, where he taught the violin, organised services with music, composed, and gave concerts. Publications of his works began to appear in 1705, including trio sonatas, violin sonatas, and concerto sets. He had also disseminated a number of concertos in manuscript form, as well as two oratorios for the Pietà, the most significant being Juditha triumphans in 1716. Opera became an increasingly important part of Vivaldi's output in the second decade of the 18th century, and he premiered his first opera, Ottone in villa, in Vicenza in 1713. He wrote for theatres in Venice and Mantua, where the Habsburg governor, Prince Philip of Hesse-Darmstadt, was a famous music lover. Following the success of his opera Armida al campo d'Egitto, the prince appointed Vivaldi as maestro di cappella da camera, which role he retained for two years from 1718, writing cantatas and serenatas for the court. From 1720, his main base was Rome, where he composed more operas under the patronage of Cardinal Ottoboni, before further opera work took him back to the Teatro San Angelo in Venice from 1726 to 1728. During his travels, Vivaldi kept a position with the Pietà, regularly providing the school with concertos. From 1730, he visited Vienna and Prague, trying with mixed success to stage his operas in those cities and hoping for an appointment as composer to the Imperial court in Vienna. The death of Emperor Charles VI in 1740 left him without even a prospective patron and Vivaldi died in poverty the following year. Vivaldi's music suffered a century of neglect following his death. It was rediscovered in the 19th century thanks to a resurgence of interest in the music of J.S. Bach, when scholars came across his transcriptions of ten of Vivaldi's concertos while preparing a complete edition of Bach's music. Ironically, Vivaldi's "resurrection" came about through a composer for whom he had been a crucial influence. Among the works Vivaldi left behind, the most significant are his concertos, about 500 in all, half of which are for solo violin and strings; his 90 sonatas; and his 40 operas, of which 21 survive.