Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons
In October 2001, Andrew Manze and AAM toured Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, a work which in many people’s minds is an established classic, set down in the eighteenth-century and remaining unchanged ever since. Yet, as Christopher Hogwood explains below, nothing could be further from the truth. With so many versions available, editors and players are presented with many issues to consider before committing it to paper or performance.
The Four Seasons: a new edition by Christopher Hogwood
The enormous popularity of The Four Seasons is startlingly
disproportionate to the scanty source materials on which performances of
these masterpieces are based. Unlike most ‘top-sellers’ (Handel’s
Messiah, Mozart’s Requiem, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony) where we have
autograph material, our sole source of these works until recently has been
the printed set of 12 concertos titled Il cimento dell’armonia e
dell’inventione Op. 8, issued in 1725 by Michel-Charles Le Céne (successor
to Estienne Roger) in Amsterdam
Ever since the first appearance of The Four Seasons in modern print (an arrangement for piano duet made in 1919) and the first electric recording (by Bernadino Molinari in 1942), almost all printed and performed versions have been derived exclusively from the Le Céne version. Of this source, which is far from definitive, only one complete copy has survived (Paris, Bibliothéque Nationale), and whatever autograph or manuscript material the composer supplied for the engravers has since disappeared.
Vivaldi himself, however, admitted that earlier versions did exist. In the dedicatory letter to Count Morzin that prefaces Op. 8, Vivaldi calls himself the Count’s ‘Maestro in Italia’; he excuses the inclusion of The Four Seasons on the grounds that they are now improved and augmented ‘not only with the sonnets but with a clear description of everything pictured in them’.
The implication that those four concertos existed in an earlier form without either the sonnets, cue letters or descriptive captions is strengthened by the existence of just such a version of ‘Summer’ in manuscript in Genoa. Only the manuscript partbooks now in Manchester Public Library contain all four concertos with sonnets but without captions, and represent a finished state prior to the printed version. Paul Everett, who has made a particular study of this material, suggests that they were copied in Venice about 1726 for presentation to Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni (the patron of Handel and Corelli amongst many other artists); although they postdate the appearance of Op. 8, they ‘accurately transmit a text that is older than the retouched version as published’.
This source contains many readings that are patently more accurate (and often more difficult) than the rather slipshod printed parts, and in a number of important areas (especially articulation, figuring and chromatic inflection) they are far superior. In some passages the Manchester version gives a radically different reading from the better-known published text (the antiphonal lightning flashes between first and second violins in ‘Spring’ are one of the more immediately striking examples), and frequently corrects misprints which have become hallowed by tradition, such as the bizarre trill on the final note of the second movement of ‘Winter’. The Manchester manuscript version is as closely connected with Vivaldi as the Amsterdam print, and is here presented as the prime text for these concertos, rather than a source for secondary readings.
One of the most novel, and problematic, aspects of these Concerti figurati (a title actually used by the scribe of the second sonnet in the Manchester source) is the use of descriptive poetry, cued into the parts with letters, as well as the additional descriptive captions; while some of these captions reduplicate the poetry, others contain new information which a reading of the sonnets would not supply (the barking dog in ‘Spring’, for example, and specific meteorological effects in ‘Summer’ and ‘Autumn’).
The majority of the musical text used for AAM’s performances this month is the Manchester / Ottoboni manuscript version, with a few of the more significant alternatives from the Amsterdam print included as ossias. Very few ornaments are specified in any of the sources while extended embellishments (especially in slow movements) are the responsibility of the performer in Vivaldi’s music, and would usually have been improvised.
This article draws on the Introduction to Christopher Hogwood’s new edition of The Four Seasons, published by Bärenreiter.