Venice, at about the same latitude as Portland or Minneapolis, can get serious winter weather. Winter depicts shivering (yet another remarkable chain of dissonances), chattering teeth, and “running and stamping your feet every moment” to keep warm in snow and biting wind. We hear the prey flee from gunshots and barking hounds, and finally tire and die. The physical world, and the aristocracy, barge in with the horn calls of a hunt in the third movement. In the slow movement the sonnet speaks of revelers enjoying “sweet sleep” in the “mild and pleasant” air, but the music is mysterious and dreamlike: virtually the entire movement is another sequence of unresolved dissonances. In the third movement we get thunder, lightning, and hail.Īutumn begins with a celebration of the harvest in a vigorous dance that loses its energy as the peasants get drunk and fall asleep.

The second movement depicts the gentle, buzzing insects, and the shepherd listening with apprehension to distant thunder. Vivaldi was capable of great harmonic (and contrapuntal) sophistication when it suited his purpose, and there are passages in the Four Seasons that could easily be mistaken for something written a century after his death. The wind subsides long enough to let us hear how it makes a shepherd fear a coming storm, his agitated state depicted in a sequence of chromatically descending diminished chords - dissonances that lead to other dissonances instead of resolving. The second solo depicts the turtledove and goldfinch, and rustling of the gentle Zephyr breeze, which is joined by the violent north wind. In the first solo, the violin is an ornamented cuckoo - it’s the soloist’s task to make the cuckoo’s notes distinct in a barrage of 16th-notes. In Summer, the opening bars present the “merciless summer sun” and “man and flock” sweltering under it. The finale is a big dance accompanied by bagpipes, which are represented by droning basses. In the slow movement, a goatherd sleeps under a tree while the second violins represent “the murmuring branches and leaves” and the viola’s repeated notes represent his “faithful dog” (whining or barking, depending on how violists understand the word “grida” written in their part). In Spring’s first movement, we hear the arrival of Spring, the birds greeting it (first solo), brooks and breezes, and a quick thunderstorm. He wrote a sonnet for each concerto explaining what was going on, intended not only as description, but as instruction for performance: the sonnet verses are printed not only as prefaces to each concerto, but also in all the instrumental parts, in the midst of tempo markings and performance directions. Vivaldi was hardly the first composer to depict nature and human activities in instrumental music, but no one had conjured the physical world quite so vividly and concisely with violins before. Part of their appeal would doubtless have been their extra-musical content. By 1725, when Vivaldi published his Opus 8, a set of 12 concertos entitled The Contest between Harmony and Invention, he may well have been the most famous musician in Europe, and the first four concertos of the set, named Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter, were already well known from circulating manuscript copies.

Antonio vivaldi the four seasons spring