Vivaldi's Four Seasons
MAGAZINE ARTICLE
In the following article, which Limelight Magazine published, I explore the eternal charm of Antonio’s Vivaldi’s group of violin concerti, The Four Seasons, and why it’s spawned countless versions over the last three-hundred years, including a re-imagining by Max Richter.
It’s regularly called the world’s ‘most popular classical piece’. Though it lay neglected for 150 years, since its twentieth-century revival it has been recorded over 400 times, used in countless films, TV programs and advertising jingles, and subjected to countless re-arrangements and reinterpretations. Its universal appeal has allowed it cross the Classical-Pop divide, where it has spawned numerous remixes and re-stylisations. But its ubiquity in popular culture has anaesthetized many to its genuine musical merits, prompting attempts by classical musicians to breathe new life into a desperately overplayed work, and remind us that, underneath the popular fad, lies genuinely innovative and brilliant music. As Australia prepares for a series of performances of the work across the country in 2015, we ask the question: can we rediscover our love for Vivaldi’s Four Seasons?
Composed between 1723 and 1725, The Four Seasons constitute the first four in a larger series of twelve violin concert that Vivaldi published as his Opus 8. Vivaldi gave the cycle the academic title Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione, which is generally translated as The Contest Between Harmony and Invention. From the onset, the first four concerti proved particularly popular for their explicitly narrative quality. Some time before the Cimento was published, there had been a successful performance of the work in the Prague palace of one of Vivaldi’s most committed patrons, the Count Václav Morzin of Vrchlabí. So delighted was the Bohemian count by The Four Seasons specifically, that Vivaldi dedicated the work’s publication to him in 1725.
By the time Vivaldi penned the Cimento, he was already an extremely well-known figure in his hometown, Venice. He was 47 years old, and had been engaged for twenty-odd years as Musical Director of the prestigious Ospedale della pietà, an institution for orphaned and abandoned children whose ambitious and highly successful music program permitted him to première many of his major instrumental and choral works. He had also made a name for himself as a composer of operas, having conceived several stage works, like La costanza trionfale degli amori e degli odi (1716), that were being performed all over Italy, and enjoyed multiple revivals. His notoriety as a daring musical progressive was such that it aroused the comedic vitriol of musical satirist Benedetto Marcello who, in his scathing 1720 pamphlet, Il teatro alla moda (Fashionable Theatre), indirectly blamed Vivaldi’s style for the contemporary decadence of the art form.
To all appearances, The Four Seasons was a musical event of considerable success. Audiences responded enthusiastically to its vivid depictions of the four seasons, easily recognizing in its ingenious score, explicit references to extra-musical images, which included barking dogs, singing birds and flowing streams. Its novel construction created a remarkable stir, and there is evidence that the work’s fame persisted for at least a few decades following its conception. In 1739 French composer Nicolas Chédeville made an arrangement of the work for hurdy-gurdy, violin, flute and continuo. And 26 years later, his compatriot, Michel Corrette used material from The Spring Concerto as the basis of his Laudate Dominum de Coelis.
It is not clear when exactly The Four Seasons fell into obscurity, but we can safely say that, by 1780, few remained who cared for it, or for Vivaldi’s work in general. Times were a-changing. The Baroque idiom had gone out of fashion, and homophonic, periodic phrases had replaced sequenced polyphony as the musical order of the day. The artistic zeitgeist was pervaded by an unquenchable thirst for the new, and concert managers seldom found space in their programs for the work of dead composers. Bach’s music lay forgotten for over a century until Mendelssohn performed the St. Matthew Passion in 1830, and Pachelbel’s Canon languished in relative obscurity until Jean-François Paillard recorded it in 1968. A similar posthumous fate befell many of the early eighteenth-century bigwigs: a downward spiral to oblivion, reversed by a zealous revival.
In the case of Vivaldi and his Four Seasons, revival came gradually over several decades. Renewed interest in early repertoire was leading musicologists to delve deeper into the historical archives. Performers selling themselves as early-music specialists began championing works by long-forgotten masters. In 1939, Italian composer Alfredo Casella organized the Vivaldi Week, an event instrumental in raising awareness of Vivaldi’s work. In the following decades, several moderately successful recordings appeared of The Four Seasons, including those by Alfredo Campoli (1939), Bernardino Molinari (1942) and Louis Kaufman with the New York Philharmonic (1948). In 1955, I Musici of Rome performed it with Felix Ayo as soloist, and the record sold well enough that, four years later, it was made in stereo. Yet, as late at the 1960s, The Four Seasons was still relatively unknown to European audiences. Neville Marriner, who frequently performed it in the ‘60s with his early music ensemble, The Academy of Saint Martin in the Fields, claims that The Four Seasons was, at that time, in demand mainly in the Far East: “We were playing the work a lot in Japan, of all places. Audiences there were not accustomed to hearing classical music, and the piece’s storyline aspect made it particularly easy for their untrained ears to understand. But In England, it wasn’t well-known at all.”
It was not until 1969 that Vivaldi’s real break came. Spurred on by commercial interest from his record label Decca, Marriner set out to make a recording of these four quirky and charismatic violin concerti. “The time was ripe,” Marriner reveals. “The recording company was very keen, and they did most of our PR work for us. Our soloist, Alan Loveday was in his prime. And this was exactly the kind of repertoire that we wanted to be known for: virtuosic baroque string music.” The Saint-Martin-in-the-Fields recording is, in fact, seen as a milestone in the Four Seasons’ performance history, and is considered by some, including music writer Norman Lebrecht, as singlehandedly responsible for the work’s meteoric rise as a popular hit. “The recording was quite an eye-opener,” Marriner reflects. “People bought the record and talked about it. The recording company did a great job promoting it, but there’s no way we could have planned the success it had. It was almost an accident.”
The Four Seasons has since become one of best-known and most instantly recognizable pieces of classical music. The years following 1969 bore witness to an explosion of recordings of the work and, for a while, it’s all anyone wanted to hear in concert halls. Its immense popularity, which has persisted to this day, has led it to acquire the enviable status of a cultural phenomenon. It has wormed its way into countless films (Pretty Woman, The Intouchables, I Am David, The Banger Sisters) and innumerable TV series (True Blood, The Sopranos, The Simpsons, Hannibal, The Big Bang Theory, Ugly Betty, Six Feet Under, Chicago Hope, The Ren and Stimpy Show). It has spawned a plethora of rearrangements, including high-profile reworkings by Astor Piazzolla (1970), flautist Jean-Pierre Rampal (1993) and accordionist Richard Galliano (2013).
The Four Seasons is one of those rare beasts: a work whose universal appeal has made it, at once, a classical and a popular staple. We might be tempted to call it by the epithet, Crossover Classical, if it weren’t so contentious. It has leapt over the usually impassible Classical-Pop divide like only a handful of other baroque works (Bach’s Air on the G-string, Pachelbel’s Canon, Albinoni’s Adagio in G minor), and many who’ve never set foot in a Classical concert hall use it to chill out, dine, and get married to. Its charms have not gone unnoticed by musicians working outside of the classical sphere of influence, and many of these, like jazz musician Jacques Loussier (1997) and thrash metal artist The Great Kat (1998), have used excerpts of the concerti as the basis of effective musical retreatments.
The phenomenal success and near-universal appeal of The Four Seasons is not as easily explained as one might presume. Why a set of four concerti should have obtained this level of ubiquity, while so many others Vivaldi and his contemporaries wrote remain relatively neglected, is a complex and, to a certain degree, mysterious question. Sure, these are cleverly put together works with very lovely tunes – but can’t the same be said of a lot of Vivaldi’s work, and baroque music in general? The Australian Chamber Orchestra’s Richard Tognetti puts the work’s supremacy down to a pre-existing primordial energy that it seems to tap into; a mysterious cosmic vitality that Vivaldi doesn’t invent, but rather captures, almost like a prophetic medium: “This music lives in the Ether,” Tognetti ventures. “You feel like you’ve heard it before even if you haven’t, like Vivaldi simply codified something already there.” Somewhat more prosaically, Marriner accounts for its cross-genre appeal with reference to its almost pop-like structural underpinnings: “The pop world of music – with its three chords and eight-bar tunes – found The Four Seasons very attractive. The limited musical expectation from young people made the piece, whose ideas come in shorts bursts, immediately comprehensible.”
Mystical or mechanical, its power as a far-reaching cultural symbol cannot be overestimated. But is the overwhelming popularity of The Four Seasons necessarily a good thing? Just as easily as you can claim it’s the world’s best-known classical piece, you can also argue it’s the most nauseatingly overplayed – a rather more dubious honour. Its cross-genre ubiquity has, at once, ensured its survival and, paradoxically, brought about its stagnation. While the masses have never tired of it, many classical music aficionados have, at times, grown disillusioned by its mass-vulgarisation and turned their backs on it. After witnessing its remarkable rise in the aftermath of the 1969 recording, Marriner and the Academy quickly distanced themselves from the work. “We tried to put it away,” Marriner recalls. “We didn’t want to be labeled with any particular piece, and for a while we couldn’t go anywhere without being asked to play The Four Seasons, so we would suggest alternatives to it.” Violinist Alan Loveday reached a similar point: “After 10 years of playing it continuously, he stopped. He’d had enough too.”
Rather than abandoning The Four Seasons altogether, some performers have attempted to reclaim it in one way or another. When violinist Nigel Kennedy set out to make a recording of the four concerti with the English Chamber Orchestra in 1989, his aim was to breathe new life into them, and prove the modern relevance of Vivaldi’s genius. The result was Vivaldi as had never been heard: raw yet poignant, bursting with fresh vitality yet artistically cohesive. It went on to be one of the best-selling classical music albums of all-time, selling over two million units.
Animated by a similar urge to rescue a beloved work from stagnation, German composer Max Richter took to Vivaldi’s score in 2012. By redressing Vivaldi’s writing in contemporary clothing, Richter, like Kennedy, hoped to inject new life into an all-too-familiar work. “I’d fallen in love with The Four Seasons as a kid,” Richter says. “But when I started hearing it in advertising jingles, and everywhere else, I stopped being able to enjoy it. So that was my process – to reconnect with Vivaldi’s work.” The Recomposed: Vivaldi, The Four Seasons is the fruit of Richter’s labours; a work that takes 25 percent of Vivaldi’s original material, and subjects it to a variety of post-minimalist and electronic transformations. By turns wistful, brooding and abrasive, the Recomposed Four Seasons plays as an incisive but never-irreverent commentary on Vivaldi’s part in recent music history.
In mid-March, four months after the Wordless Orchestra gave the work its Australian première under the Richter’s direction, Australian audiences will once again have the opportunity to see The Recomposed Four Seasons performed live, this time by Paul Dyer and the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra. For no apparent reason other than coincidence, Australia will also see multiple high-profile renditions of the work in its original version in 2015. These include performances by: The Brandenburg Orchestra with Shuan Hern Lee in Perth on May 2; the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra with Dale Barltrop on June 25 and 26; and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra with James Ehnes in mid October.
Not to be left out, Tognetti’s ACO has also programmed The Four Seasons into its 2015 subscription series, but with a very specific goal in mind. Echoing Kennedy and Richter’s need for a fresh perspective on this popular work, Tognetti uses historical context to see Vivaldi’s work anew. “The point of difference, for me, is what I call ‘recontextualisation’,” Tognetti asserts. “In other words: Where does the piece come from? What is it saying? I want to find an answer to these questions, rather than simply mess around with the piece. I wouldn’t have programmed The Four Seasons without the possibility of recontextualising it.” And what specific recontextualisation does Tognetti have in mind for The Four Seasons? The surprising answer: an alleged Middle Eastern connection. “I’m hoping to find some kind of Middle-Eastern musical inspiration in Vivaldi’s music,” he explains. “When you listen to the Four Seasons, you can hear it. I often jam with the Oud player, Joseph Tawadros. When I improvise in certain sections of his Egyptian-style compositions, I find I can easily insert snippets of Vivaldi’s material without it sounding out of place: the sequences and the melodic and harmonic minor scales work perfectly in that harmonic context.”
“We know there was an Arabic influence on Venetian art and architecture,” Tognetti continues. “And we know there was a great deal of trade between Venice and the Middle East in Vivaldi’s time. But we’re still looking for proof that there was a musical exchange. I’m certain it’s there, however, and hopeful I’ll find it.” Proof or no proof, Tognetti’s recontextalised Four Seasons will go ahead this year, bookending the ACO’s 2015 season with performances in February and November. To highlight the Arabic connection, Tawadros’ Oud will be utilised as the improvising instrument in some of the work’s movements, and a selection of Tawdros’ own Oud pieces will be performed alongside it.
Kennedy, Richter and Tognetti typify, each in their own way, the somewhat tormented relationship musicians have with The Four Seasons. While its familiarity often leads them to shun it in all but the most exceptional circumstances, its irresistible charm compels them to seek out oftentimes unintuitive justifications for reproposing it. The Four Seasons has a rather problematic duality: it is, at once, a work of appeal and a work of genius. Since its revival, it has straddled these two worlds, and it hasn’t necessarily done so gracefully. In reaching such summits of mass-diffusion, it has anaesthetized many of its listeners to its artistic merits, leading us to forget how musically satisfying well put together it is. In short, we’ve forgotten why it became so popular to begin with.
So what are some of the merits The Four Seasons possesses? Richter reminds us of the critical role played by the work’s form and melody. “Vivaldi is such a great melodist,” he points out. “And The Four Seasons is so radical and daring. It has a very contemporary feel to it. It cuts between fast and slow, loud and soft, making it structurally very dramatic.” Marriner speaks of the work’s intuitive, almost natural construction: “The work has an inevitability that is very attractive; you have the impression that every musical figure you hear was meant to be there. There’s an extraordinary simplicity in it, but not the kind that’s unfulfilling. There’s a satisfaction you feel with the shape, the harmonic structure.”
Its most remarkable feature, however, might also be its most taken-for-granted. The Four Seasons is, above all, a story told through music. It traces the joys and tribulations of certain pastoral figures – il capraro (the goatherd), i villanelli (peasants) – over the course of the four seasons. Vivaldi peppers his score with musical figures that highlight the unfolding action and, not wanting to leave the matter to chance, also includes poetic verses and explicit descriptions that place his narrative intent beyond doubt. In the first movement of the Autumn concerto, joyful quavers denoting the song and dance of the peasants (il ballo e canto de’ villanelli), give way to the languid, sedate melody of the sleeping drunk (l’Vbriaco che dorme).
The Four Seasons’ narrative dimension was revolutionary for its time. Composers like Monteverdi and Josquin had written pictorially, to be sure, but Vivaldi took it to the next level. His imitative moments – the canto dè gl’Vcelli (bird calls) of Spring, the zeffiretti dolci (soft breezes) of Summer, the aggiacciato tremar (frozen shivering) of Winter – are not mere decorative affectations, but vital pieces in a narrative sequence. For the first time in history, extra-musical ideas were being used to shape musical structure. In this respect, Vivaldi was over a century ahead of his time. We had to wait until Berlioz marched to the scaffold in his Symphonie Fantastique (1830), before the kind of programmatic approach foreshadowed in The Four Seasons became mainstream.
The Four Seasons’ narrative dimension answers a lot of questions. It explains why Count Morzin viewed it as the highlight of the Cimento cycle; why it was thrilling Japanese audiences before its European revival; why it has captured the imagination of people everywhere from Bonn to Buenos Aires; and, critically, why it has overshadowed so much contemporaneous repertoire. Vivaldi’s other instrumental works (L’estro armonico, op. 3, La tempesta di mare, RV 253, La caccia, RV 352) contain only figurative, never narrative elements. They allude to extra-musical ideas, and convey them superficially, but never allow them to define the music formally. The Four Seasons ticks all boxes. It is satisfying both musically and dramatically. It appeals to the uninitiated masses and the specialized few alike. It is, at once, deeply human, and cosmically transcendent. It is for these reasons we can thank the brave few, like Kennedy, Richter and Tognetti, who do their part to save it from the indifference of ubiquity. A work as special as The Four Seasons deserves a far better fate than that.
