Thunder and Lightning, Day 1 – Concerto for violin in E major, Opus 12, No. 1 “Spring” by Antonio Vivaldi

This week’s theme is…Thunder and Lightning!  The awesome and wonderful phenomena of lightning and thunder, always companions in the natural world, has mystified, terrified, and amazed human observers as long as they have inhabited the Earth.  As our scientific understanding of the universe has sharpened our understanding of lighting and thunder has improved, but they still inspire vivid depictions in art and music.  This week we explore examples of this.

Thunder and Lightning, Day 1 – Concerto for violin in E major, Opus 12, No. 1 “Spring” by Antonio Vivaldi

If you hear the name “Antonio Vivaldi” you probably think “concerto” (if you think “The Four Seasons” you are also thinking of concertos  – it is a set of four violin concertos) and you would certainly be right to do so.  For more about Vivaldi’s concertos see this post.  Vivaldi made his deepest and most enduring mark upon the face of music history with his hundreds of concertos (conservative estimates put the total number at 500, more liberal ones at 700).  At one point his contract with the Venetian orphanage where he directed music required his composing of 2 concertos per month intended for performance by the girls in his care.  That’s 24 concertos per year; at that rate he would write 100 in 4 years, and that doesn’t count the others that he wrote at the same time for other patrons.  If a career lasts 40 years and you maintain that rate of production, the grand total would end up at almost 1000, so even the more generous estimates may come up short.  Actually, Vivaldi did not quite fulfill his entire promise to the orphanage, with its records showing evidence of 140 concertos composed over the course of 10 years, an average of just over 1 per month.  Either he did not deliver fully on his promise or the records are incomplete.  But still, the man was prolific.

What surprises many people, even devoted fans of Vivaldi’s music, is his production of other genres besides concertos.  Vivaldi was also prolific as a composer of church music and operas.  For quite a long stretch of his life, more than two decades out of his 63 years, or a full third of his life, Vivaldi was heavily involved in composing and producing operas.  Other of his opera composing contemporaries became more successful than him, but he had a good run and profited considerably from his operatic ventures.  In one letter he refers to an astounding 94 operas that came from his pen!  It may be an exaggeration, and he may have been counting operas by other composers which he produced, but even the 50 or so that make the list on Wikipedia…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_operas_by_Antonio_Vivaldi

…is impressive – just a few more than Handel who is better known as an opera composer (for more about Handel’s operas see this post).

Bottom line, Vivaldi was prolific, writing new music all the time, and establishing himself as an expert in multiple genres.  And not just writing new music, but writing new music that is well-crafted, precisely wrought with regard to harmony and counterpoint, attractive, and fun to listen to and play.  In spite of his breathtaking composing speed, you will never encounter a passage in a work by Vivaldi that seems to have wrong notes, awkward proportions or clumsy phrasing.  Speed is not the same as haste.  And he wasn’t the only one.  Bach, Handel, Telemann, Mozart, Haydn – all the significant artists of this time, and many less significant ones as well, understood their job to be essentially this.  And so the amount of original musical ideas that animate their works is astounding.  But if you were operating at this rate of production, do you think you might ever be tempted to take a shortcut?  Here’s what I mean.  Listen to this opera, Giustino, by Vivaldi, and scroll to just before the 20:00 mark and listen for a couple minutes:

 

Do you hear it?  Just after a slow lyrical mezzo-soprano aria we hear a jaunty orchestral sinfonia, in this case accompanying the entrance of a the character Fortune, present to turn the title character’s luck around.  But it sounds a little familiar doesn’t it?  If you’ve heard that theme before, I bet it was in this much more famous context:

 

Isn’t it nifty the way Vivaldi is able to create two completely different pieces out of the same material?  In the opera it’s a short binary orchestral piece that lasts a few phrases, gives the listener a few interesting twists and turns, and then promptly ends to keep the drama moving forward.  Sinfonias in Baroque operas were never very long because the singing was the central selling point.  But in the violin concerto it is considerably more fully developed, featuring numerous solo episodes with ample opportunity for soloistic display, and proceeding to illustrate a variety of colorful situations that Vivaldi associated with nature’s spring clothing.  Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, a collection of four violin concertos published as part of his Opus 8 collection, are among the first notable examples of program music.  Program music is music based on an external story or idea (for more about program music see this post).  All the movements of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons feature accompanying “sonnets” which either describe or inspire the musical events (chicken or egg?  It’s not clear whether the words or the music came first).  The first movement of Spring illustrates, most convincingly, singing birds, babbling brooks, gentle breezes, thunder and lightning.  Vivaldi was clever for packing such dense programmatic material into the brief, concentrated form of one of his concerto movements, and more clever still for giving that theme the double duty of operating within a completely different context in his opera Giustino.  Both the opera and the concertos were written around the same time, the early 1720s.

While there are other examples of this “borrowing” technique in Vivaldi’s oeuvre, he was not the only composer to take advantage of this kind of shortcut.  His contemporary Handel practically made a cottage industry of it.  Anyone who becomes familiar with Handel’s body of work will begin to hear much of the same material coming back again and again.  Like the Vivaldi example above, the artistry is in adapting the material to work in different contexts carried by different orchestral forces.  Here’s one of my favorite examples in Handel’s output.  The first is a movement from a sonata for solo violin, and the second is a chorus from the oratorio Solomon (for more on Handel’s oratorios, see this post).  The ensembles could hardly be more different, but listen to how masterfully Handel works with the peppy theme in each case:

 

 

While it is considerably more rare to find this kind of borrowing in the works of J.S. Bach, there do exist a couple notable examples, such as this one:

 

 

And even after the furious daily-work churn of the Baroque composers had subsided as the patronage system faded out of existence, Romantic composers sometimes adapted material of previous works into different contexts.  One famous example is the First Symphony of Gustav Mahler, several movements of which quote directly from a song cycle composed earlier called “Songs of a Wayfarer”, but what might be better translated as “Songs of a Spurned Lover”.  If you listen to this song:

 

And then listen to this movement – scroll to 3:50 and you will hear the resemblance:

 

 

There are several such quotations of the song cycle throughout the symphony.

While later composers such as Mahler were still apt to quote their previous work, borrowing was an essential shortcut in the toolkit of the eighteenth century composer, under constant pressure to produce high quality work after high quality work as he was, and even the very best of them kept it close at hand.  It is understandable that even the most resourceful of them would be tempted to dip into their previous efforts in order to adapt dependable material into new statements.  In the hands of a composer with the skill of Bach, Handel or Vivaldi, the result is a pair of solid works based on the same material, the resonance of which can delight us each time.

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Triple Compound Toe Tappers, Day 3 – Concerto in D major for four violins Opus 3, No. 1 by Antonio Vivaldi

This week’s theme is…Triple Compound Toe Tappers!  4/4 time is so prevalent in music of all styles that it has a nickname, “common time”.  If you say “common time” to a musician, you can bet they will understand that you intend each measure to have four beats, and each beat to divide in half.  Given its nickname, you may sometimes find a letter “C” written at the beginning of a musical score to indicate this.  There is another meter that I am tempted to nickname “rare time” and may start representing it with a letter  “R”.  It is compound triple, meaning there are three beats per measure and each beat is divided into 3.  Always written with a 9 on top of the time signature, the super lilty compound triple, like a waltz within a waltz, is, in my experience, the rarest of all of the meter types.  But there’s enough notable examples to fill a week with great music, so enjoy!

Triple Compound Toe Tappers, Day 3 – Concerto in D major for four violins Opus 3, No. 1 by Antonio Vivaldi

Vivaldi’s most famous composition is of course what we know as The Four Seasons, which is a collection of short, virtuosic 3 movement concertos for solo violin, all of which correspond to the different seasons of the year.  The concertos of The Four Seasons are special, unlike any of Vivaldi’s other concertos, in that they feature accompanying sonnets for each movement, brief verses to describe exactly the events and scenes Vivaldi was trying to depict in each episode of the music, images which he captures with charming precision (for more about The Four Seasons, see this post).  As such they are terrific early examples of program music before it was cool (for more about programmatic music, see this post).

 

If you’ve never listened to The Four Seasons while following the accompanying sonnets, well, you definitely should – it is surprising and delightful how beautifully well Vivaldi captures the images, anticipating a major current in Western classical music by more than a century.  This little twist has helped the concertos of The Four Seasons to become and remain his very greatest hits, and the fact is that this little gimmick probably makes them more interesting to modern audiences than at least 90 percent of his other works, be they concerto, sonata, sacred choral music, or opera.  But even without this gimmick, his hundreds of other concerti contain beautiful passages and are beloved by numerous listeners, even if the others don’t quite have the audience that The Four Seasons do.

Here’s a little secret – The Four Seasons are actually the first third of a larger collection Vivaldi published in 1725 as Opus 8 (for more about the opus system, see this post), which he named The Contest Between Harmony and Invention (Vivaldi must’ve had a penchant for florid, pretentious titles).  Opus 8 is a collection of twelve concertos for solo violin, and many of them are programmatic, even if they don’t have the phrase-by-phrase sonnets that The Four Seasons do.  There’s a concerto about a storm at sea, one called Pleasure (and it fits), and one about hunting (see this post), so that’s more than half of Opus 8 which have extra musical associations of some kind.  One other concerto bears the subtitle “for Pisendel”, which indicates that it was written for the great Johann Georg Pisendel, a very famous violinist and composer of the day for whom Telemann and Bach also wrote virtuoso works.

The concertos of Vivaldi’s Opus 8 may be the best known of our day, but it was another, earlier collection which solidified his early reputation.  By the time Vivaldi released his Opus 8 concertos in 1725, this collection had been in circulation for almost 15 years.  It is his Opus 3, also a collection of 12 3-movement concertos for violin.  Its similarly florid title L’estro Armonico does not translate all that well into English.  A literal translation would be “The harmonic estrus”, but that’s an odd phrase, since “estrus” refers to a female animal being in heat.  Perhaps it should be taken to mean “The harmonic passion”, but I also sometimes see it translated as “The Harmonic Inspiration”.  Just one of those phrases that doesn’t translate well I guess.

Whereas Opus 8 consists entirely of concertos for solo violin, Opus 3 features an appealing variety that sets it apart in this respect.  Four of the twelve concertos are written for solo violin, but four are written for a pair of solo violins, and yet another four are written for a quartet of solo violins.  As such this shows Vivaldi’s comfort with both the solo concerto and the concerto grosso, which is a concerto written for a group of soloists instead of just one.  The resulting variety of texture makes the collection most attractive and easy to listen to.  In addition to that, I find the unceasing melodic invention contained in Opus 3 to be incredibly charming and appealing.  I noticed this immediately upon hitting “play” and hearing the opening bars of the endearing first concerto, scored for 4 violins, when I first got to know Opus 3 as a high schooler.  Give it a try and see if you don’t agree:

 

The appealing finale of that first concerto, which follows a slow, unison dirge middle movement, is written in a quirky triple compound, like a lopsided gigue.  The cascading sequences pile delight upon delight as the movement zips by.

Vivaldi’s Opus 3 took Europe by storm.  Everyone was playing and listening to those concertos in all of the major urban centers.  Bach admired the collection, learned from it, and arranged some of the movements for harpsichord.  From listening to some of Handel’s writing for string orchestra it is obvious that he had assimilated measure of Vivaldi’s flair as well.  

Developing violinists typically become familiar with a handful of Vivaldi’s Opus 3 concertos during the course of their study.  The most famous is Number 6, a solo concerto in a minor, currently found in Suzuki Violin Volume 4:

 

Another that I have played is Number 8, a concerto for two violins, also in a minor, which gives the two soloists a delightful interplay:

 

And yet another is the enchanting tenth concerto in b minor for four violins, utterly bewitching with its delicate sensitivity.  This one is truly inspired:

With Opus 3, Vivaldi had arrived, and he was able to stay in Europe’s musical collective consciousness after that.  Opus 3 was his first published collection of concertos and it was a grand slam.  He followed it with several other collections in which small sets of his incredibly prolific production of concertos were published.  Opus 3 remained his best-loved achievement during his lifetime, but that eventually changed as he faded into obscurity.  As Vivaldi and his contemporaries were rediscovered in the twentieth century, the clever Four Seasons become incredibly popular, but the concertos of L’estro armonico have their devoted listeners as well, even if they are somewhat fewer in number than the greatest hits of Opus 8.  Opus 3 is incredibly rewarding though, and will reveal its glories upon repeated listenings.  I have come to prefer it for its delicate sensitivity, its charm, its endless invention.  If you get to you know Vivaldi’s Opus 3 yourself, you will make a friend for life.

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Music About Snow, Day 5 – Concerto for violin and orchestra, opus. 8, No. 4 “Winter” by Antonio Vivaldi

This week’s theme is…Music About Snow!  Snow is one of those everyday miracles.  Not quite water, not quite ice, the enchanting and magical hybrid of water’s states of matter transforms many locales of privileged climate into the proverbial “winter wonderland” for several months out of each year.  Its imagery is powerful on many levels, from the blanket that coats the landscape to the stunning crystalline structure apparent upon more careful inspection.  It acts almost as a living creature with its own distinctive behaviors, interacting as it does with winter’s capricious wind and temperature changes.  Snow is a fresh, powerful and mysterious substance that has inspired musicians for centuries.  Survey the many ways musicians have effectively represented snow in their compositions.

Music About Snow, Day 5 – Concerto for violin and orchestra, opus. 8, No. 4 “Winter” by Antonio Vivaldi

There is no perfect climate for an asthmatic.  The pulmonary inflammation is easily triggered by both intense cold and oppressive humidity.  It is difficult to find anywhere that is not afflicted by one of those two extremes, particularly in the European continent.  You may find relief in certain tropical locales.  San Jose in Costa Rica, for example, has a near-constant 70 degree “eternal spring” that is most temperate.  But there are also more humid zones just a stone’s throw away.

There is some question as to the true nature of Vivaldi’s chronic ailment, which he described as “strettezza di petto” (tightness of the chest).  While some have speculated that this was angina pectoris, it is most commonly assumed to be asthma.  The ailment is most significant to Vivaldi’s story, most notably in that it all but solidified the direction of his career, which could have gone in two major directions.  He was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest, and remained in holy orders for his whole life, but, as the story goes, the condition, whatever it was, made it difficult for him to sustain the vocal stamina necessary to say mass, which, at that time would have been a litany of Latin prayers recited almost continuously without interaction from the congregation.  That changed a little more than two centuries after Vivaldi’s death with the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s.  Among other things, the mass came to be recited in the vernacular of the congregation and began to incorporate a responsorial nature, with the laity taking a great role in the service, much as it had been in Protestant services for going on five centuries by that point.  But I don’t know if even this would have saved Antonio Vivaldi’s priestly function from the ravages of his cardiopulmonary impediment.  Vivaldi received a dispensation from the hierarchy that allowed him to remain ordained but free of the repetitive and time-consuming duty of saying mass.

Was Vivaldi’s dispensation really health-related, or did he posses an ulterior motive for which his malady was a convenient excuse?  Some speculate that music was Vivaldi’s true passion, one in which he would rather have been active anyway.  Of course we’ll never know.  Not without unearthing one of Vivaldi’s diaries, if he even recorded such personal thoughts.  So without certain knowledge of his true motivation, we can credit Vivaldi’s asthma for shifting his career course to what, for him, would certainly turn out to more profitable, influential, and historically enriching.  I suppose it’s always possible he could have been elevated to the episcopate, but I very much doubt it.  He more likely would have performed his priestly duty and passed on, unsung, unremembered.  Even if he had risen through the ecclesiastical ranks, we probably would not know of him, and history is replete with bishops, cardinals and other clerics celebrated during their lifetimes, but whose names die almost as quickly as they do.  Because of his asthma, or angina, we speak of the great Antonio Vivaldi, the father of the  solo concerto.  It reminds me of that story about the Zen master and the little boy  (WARNING: Strong Language!):

Did Vivaldi regard his condition as a burden?  It allowed him to lessen his liturgical workload in favor of increasing his musical one, and accounts seem to indicate this was not entirely displeasing to him, so maybe he would not have put it exactly as the story of the Zen master and the little boy, but I think it still fits.

And if it was asthma, Vivaldi could have found himself in much less bearable climates than the Mediterranean weather patterns of Venice and, later, the mild winters of Central Europe.  But I bet the summers of Venice were the worst.  Heat and humidity can cause asthma to act up, and Venetian summers would have had plenty of both, especially the humidity.  If you’re like me, you enjoy the “moderate” seasons of spring and fall the most; I’ve never been overly fond of the extremes, although I do enjoy a brisk winter day, especially if it provides a setting for vigorous outdoor physical activity like skiing or snow-shoeing.  That’s the best.  But give me spring or fall and I’m quite content.  Summer, I don’t usually care for.  Vivaldi, in his ubiquitous greatest hit, Le Quattro Stagioni, better-known to English speakers as “The Four Seasons”, seems to share my evaluation of the seasons.  He enjoys spring and fall the most, as evidenced by the undeniably cheerful and content opening movements of both, winter after that, with summer coming in at a distant 4th place.  Have you ever heard the summer concerto?  It’s thoroughly unpleasant.  Vivaldi really seems to not like summer.  The stagnant heat is relentless, filled with haze and humidity, swarming insects, and, to add insult to injury, a finale depicting violent hailstorms that trample the crops.  I wonder if his asthma had anything to do with the highly personal and subjectively distasteful experience of summer that the concerto seems to illustrate.

Vivaldi’s feelings about winter are somewhere in between, right about in the middle if the musical depiction is to be believed.  The opening movement has some unpleasantness, being caught in the cold and stamping one’s feet for warmth, hurrying along to get to whatever warm room awaits at the end of the route.  The last movement is thoroughly exuberant fun, slipping and sliding on the ice, first tentatively, and then with great relish and intention as the subject finds his bearings.  And then there is the charming, inviting, and rapturous cantilena of the brief middle movement which paints the picture so many of us love to recreate on cold days: relaxing by the fire, covered in a warm blanket, reading or sipping our favorite hot drink, with no particular plans for the coming hours:

And Vivaldi writes, not snow, but rain for the temperate Mediterranean winter, which does not tend to see the solid form of precipitation.  In his later travels to Prague and Vienna, Vivaldi would have accumulated (so to speak) more experience with snow, but the Four Seasons come from an earlier time during which he was more familiar with the Venetian climate.

The plucking accompaniment is meant to portray the rain pattering on the roof.  The melodic line of the solo violin is pure contentment in response to the comforts of a roof and a warm fire to quell the unforgiving forces of nature outside.  I’ve heard many of Vivaldi’s numerous concertos, and I have to say there is something about this melody that stands out as  particularly well-crafted and just magical.  
In The Four Seasons Vivaldi reveals an evaluations of the year’s climate zones that is close to my heart.  I feel more or less exactly the same way as he, ranking spring and fall above winter, and winter above summer.  If I lived in a Mediterranean climate, perhaps I would feel even more strongly about it.  Our winters in Wisconsin do get awfully cold, but we can enjoy essentially the same images that Vivaldi did in his Venetian winters, just with snow instead of rain.

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Music for The Hunt, Day 5 – Violin Concerto, Op. 8 No. 10 by Antonio Vivaldi

The theme of this week’s Smart and Soulful blog is…Music for the hunt!  In Wisconsin, where I live, Thanksgiving week always coincides with deer hunting season, and there are just frequent general reminders of the beloved pastime throughout the fall.  It often feels like one of the exclusive official state activities so I know a lot of hunters.  Hunting, or “The Hunt”, has been a prevalent image in music for centuries.  If you do a quick search you can easily find music from all the great masters, and many lesser ones, that seeks to portray it or has been shaped by it in some way.

Day 5 – Concerto for violin and orchestra in B-flat, Op. 3 No. 10 “The Hunt”

I guess Vivaldi knew he was on to something.  It would be a little like a baker inventing the cookie, tasting it, loving it, seling a bunch, and then proceeding over the course of his baking career to produce more cookies than anyone ever would after him even if subsequent bakers made them bigger and bigger and baked them in different ways with different ingredients and frosting designs.  Because he knew a good thing when he tasted it.  And maybe it’s not quite fair to say it that way.  Afterall, less than a generation after Vivaldi composers like Mozart were writing concertos fully 3 times the length of Vivaldi’s, so you could say that in a way each of Mozart’s concertos is worth 3 of Vivaldi’s, that each of Beethoven’s is worth 4 times, and that each of Brahms’ or Rachmaninov’s 5 times.  And that’s probably about as long as they got, at least the ones that followed Vivaldi’s model.  But even in light of that, Vivaldi left them all in the dust.  He wrote…so many concertos.

And maybe “invented” is too strong.  To be sure, there were composers prior to Vivaldi who wrote concertos.  Fellow Italians whose names ended in “-ini” or “-elli” (there’s always more of them to discover; have you ever taken that silly “Italian Composer or Pasta Quiz”?  It’s harder than you might think…go ahead and post your score in the comments, and it’s more fun if you don’t cheat) who crafted sparkly concerti grossi filled with busy and delicate string writing during the time before and during Vivaldi’s life.  But no one did them like Vivaldi, and he wrote…so many concertos.  Vivaldi’s concertos, mostly for soloist and orchestra, as opposed to a group of soloists as was the case for the concerto grosso (and Vivaldi wrote those too, but they feel different than, say, Corelli’s – they have sharper edges and are somehow more soloistic than those of other Italians), have this formulaic nature, a true recipe for success.  But this is about concertos and not cookies, right?  Have you ever heard that old joke?  Vivaldi didn’t write 500 concertos (or 600, or 700, or whatever the official count is these days), he wrote 1 concerto 500 (or 600, or 700) times.  Do you buy that?  To be fair I would say it has the ring of truth.  I hate comparisons like these, but are there really 300 episodes of Scooby Doo ?  The answer probably depends on how much you like Scooby Doo.  Here’s another one: are there 50 items on Taco Bell’s menu, or is it the same item 50 times?  Again, it probably depends on how much you like Taco Bell.  Or maybe not.

But we all know the cast.  3 movements, fast-slow-fast, each between 2 and 4 minutes long.  The outer movements bristle with the rapid interplay between orchestra and soloist, shot through with energetic and acute motives that go from key to key.  Long soloistic episodes are drawn out over circle progressions with just a few too many sequential links (the most I’ve ever counted is 9.  I was like, “really Vivaldi?”  It’s actually a pretty famous one) with violinistic (usually) figuration that is idiomatic yet challenging, and a generally vital spirit that feels…just kind of pointed and crystalline to me – it’s hard to put my finger on that feeling.  But even the slower middle movements, cantilena as they may be, exhibit this hard, brittle quality.

However original and distinct Vivaldi’s concertos were from one another, Europe loved them.  His Opus 3 (for more reading on opus numbers, see this post) set of twelve concertos for 1, 2, or 4 violins, L’estro armonico (if you ever hear a translation of that title that makes sense, give me a call!), published in 1711, took the continent by storm.  It’s been described as the most influential set of instrumental works of the eighteenth century; I might even go a little further than that and say all of musical history, but that’s debatable I suppose.  The concerto came to dominate eighteenth and nineteenth century solo virtuosity and we have Antonio Vivaldi to thank for that, so I would say that his influence certainly extends far beyond his own century.

I think you can draw a lot of close parallels between Vivaldi’s concerto production and Haydn’s symphonies.  Both Haydn and Vivaldi were somehow drawn to these genres that were more or less in their infancy and waiting for a focused and almost obsessive creative mind to bring them to their initial maturity.  The models of both forms developed by Vivaldi and Haydn served as foundation and inspiration for creative artists of subsequent generations to expand and deepen significantly.  While any knowledgeable music lover would credit Vivaldi and Haydn for their brilliant seasoning of the concerto and symphony, respectively, I doubt you will find many of the same music lovers who would count either of their concertos or symphonies among their absolute favorites, probably preferring concertos of Rachmaninov, Beethoven, Brahms or Mozart, and symphonies of Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn or Mahler.  But, and this is a crucial “but”, without the copious efforts of Vivaldi and Haydn to establish their prefered forms, none of these later, deeply expressive statements would have been possible.

And there are other parallels between Haydn’s symphonies and Vivaldi’s concertos.  They were prolifically produced, astoundingly so.  No artist since either has come close to matching Haydn’s 104 symphonies or Vivaldi’s 500 to 700 concertos.  Not by a longshot.  And for both bodies of work, mixed in with the mostly abstract, absolute examples, are a large handful of named works that seem to have extra musical or programmatic content.  See this post for a related exploration this phenomenon in Haydn’s symphonic output.  Like Haydn’s symphonies, many of Vivaldi’s concertos bear non-musical nicknames which reflect the character and content of those specific concertos.  Glance at this list.  If you scroll down and watch the right hand column you can see the names in italics.  If you do anything enough times (like, say, five hundred times), you will probably try to find ways to spice up your experience and break the tedium.  The names and extra musical associations of both Haydn’s symphonies and Vivaldi’s concertos are, I would submit, evidence of this.

Of course we all know the 4 most famous examples of this in Vivaldi’s oeuvre, often found together in concert and recording as a set, The Four Seasons.  They’re an interesting experiment in program music before it was cool, and it is rare to find the programmatic content illuminated with the specificity that Vivaldi has indicated in the score, labeling little vignettes of each season as the various movements progress.  Have you ever read along while listening?  Vivaldi was supremely efficient in constructing each movement from episodes corresponding to events, weather patterns, and activities appropriate to each season, and I always find it most impressive that he was able to illustrate all those images and still stay within his concerto conventions.

But The Four Seasons are actually just the first four of his twelve concertos Op. 8, The Contest Between Harmony and Invention, a set of solo violin concertos, which includes other programmatic concertos like “The Storm at Sea” and “Pleasure” and, No. 10, “The Hunt”.  And the 3rd movement of Autumn is about the hunt too, so Vivaldi’s Opus 8 is a veritable hunter’s delight!

Or maybe he was cheating a little?   However you feel about him “double dipping”, perhaps you can think of Op. 8 number 10 as a fun 3-movement interpolation of the single movement hunt from the Autumn concerto that so many people know and love.

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