Vivaldi the violinist
‘He came with his fingers within a grass-stalk’s breadth of the bridge, so that the bow had no room. He played a fugue on all four strings with such incredible speed that everyone was startled’.
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Antonio Vivaldi, as seen by Pier Leone Ghezzi in 1723
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This striking description of Vivaldi improvising a cadenza during an opera performance in 1715 in Venice captures perfectly the character of the composer who was such a pivotal figure in the development of violin music. A proto-Paganini with his long fingers stretching up the fingerboard into hitherto uncharted territory, I can well imagine his fiery red curls flying dramatically while playing with an almost religious fervour (he was, after all, trained as a priest). If only I had such an image in mind when, as a young boy, I took my first steps in violin playing, like so many other beginners, with Vivaldi’s A minor Concerto RV356, a ‘warhorse’ of juvenile scrapers everywhere. Those characteristic repeated notes of the opening and the seemingly prosaic passagework would have seemed much less of a chore had I an inkling of Vivaldi’s free imagination and passion at the violin.
A vain man, he had no small opinion of his playing and composition. He was proud of his fame and his illustrious patrons and demanded high fees as a result. His vast output was facilitated by an extraordinarily quick hand in composition, a fact of which he boasted, and he was particularly sensitive to criticism of his music by listeners who could not reconcile such a prodigious opus with consistent quality. Of course his speed in writing was necessitated by his duties at the Pio Ospedale Della Pietà, where he was ‘Maestro di Violino’ from 1703–1709 and 1711–1716. The Pietà was an orphanage for girls in Venice, Vivaldi’s home town, which specialised in musical training. Don Antonio Vivaldi, nicknamed ‘il Prete Rosso’ (the Red Priest) on account of his hair, had an impressive list of duties here. He had to teach violin to a large number of the girls, composition to some (interestingly enough, only if they wrote in his style!), rehearse and direct the orchestra, was in charge of procuring instruments and instrument repair and had to provide a constant supply of fresh music for the institution. The services at the Pietà soon grew in reputation and had the status of concerts rather than religious gatherings, a stop there being an essential part of any foreigner’s visit to the city. Vivaldi’s music and the excellence of the orchestra were no doubt the main attractions but one cannot help thinking that the spectacle of an orchestra made up entirely of teenaged girls, many of whom achieved considerable proficiency and even fame outside the Pietà, was also a strong lure!
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The Pio Ospedale della Pietà (on the far side of the canal in the centre)
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Whatever the judgement of his professional contemporaries, Vivaldi’s contribution to the development of the concerto is unarguable. Until his first essays in the solo concerto, composers’ efforts had been largely directed toward the concerto grosso, a piece for orchestra with a small group of solo instruments, the ‘concertino’. The drama in such a work was achieved by the contrast in colour, texture and dynamics between these two groups — solo parts emerging briefly from orchestral tuttis only to be subsumed again by the larger ensemble but both generally exploring the same musical material. Vivaldi wrote many pieces which, on the face of it, are concerti grossi but which develop the idea of contrast by including extended solo passages for one or more instruments, often using material unrelated to the orchestral tuttis. Although Vivaldi was by no means the first composer to successfully write for a solo instrument with orchestra (one thinks of Torelli and Albinoni in particular) it was he who finally set the form which we instantly recognise today as a Baroque concerto. The characteristic pattern of orchestral ‘ritornelli’ alternating with solo passage work in outer movements and aria-like middle movements was the framework which inspired so many composers after him. Bach, of course, was the prime example, arranging many of Vivaldi’s Violin Concertos for the harpsichord, thus setting him on the path to his own masterpieces.
The justifiable fame and popularity of his Four Seasons sadly overshadows the rest of Vivaldi’s output for violin in mainstream concert repertoire. This is particularly regrettable in the case of the Opus 12 set of concertos which reveal the full range of Vivaldi’s musical personality, from the wistful, philosophical atmosphere of No.I to the showy ebulliance of, say the last movement of Concerto No.V. Concerto No.III is a piece for strings without soloist and with it’s striking dissonances, bold chromaticism and vigorous character deserves to be at least as well known as the Sinfonias Al santo sepulchro or the famous Concerto Alla Rustica.
So what are the special demands facing the performer of these pieces? On a purely violinistic level the passages of repeated cross-string patterns with mixed bowings require a steady hand in bowing as well as facility in double stops; Vivaldi’s prediliction for double-stopping, particularly the interval of a fifth, high up the instrument is a great souce of angst for the violinist as it requires a good deal of pressure to depress the strings all the way to the fingerboard here (we know that Paganini had a very low action on his violin to facilitate extended playing in high positions: I wonder if Vivaldi, with his experience in maintaining the Pietà’s collection of instruments, might have fixed a similar setup for himself?). All his other usual tricks are here including rapid arpeggios and scale passages, often with a mischievous bowing of which he was particularly fond where bow changes occur exactly in the ‘wrong’ places (i.e. off the beat instead of on it). This bowing gives a delightfully jazzy syncopation to certain passages but can be a real ‘tongue-twister’ for the fingers!
Vivaldi took great joy in writing non-symmetrical phrases, often using an odd number of bars in a common-time movement where phrase lengths of 2, 4 and 8 bars would be normal and commonly a finishing a phrase on the half bar. It is this characteristic phrasing which emphasises the rhetorical nature of Vivaldi’s music and actually outweighs in good part the significance of all his pyrotechnics (let us not forget that his training as a priest would have given him a thorough grounding in the rules of rhetoric). Such oddly proportioned phrasing can ‘wrong-foot’ the performer and listener alike but when we examine carefully the emphasis given to individual notes and motifs, logic and order are revealed. Treating the music as if it were a spoken text we can find it’s own articulations, subtle shifts of meaning, repetitions and even punch lines, for these concerti certainly show off Vivaldi’s sense of humour to great effect. His lighter side often comes through with his use of the musical device ‘perfidia’ with which a composer, through repetition of a particular figure, seeks almost to bore his audience, or at least to lull them. This has the effect of throwing the subsequent material into sharp relief and this passage in the first movement of Concerto No.VI is just such a place:
More than anything else it is most important when playing Vivaldi’s music to capture the ever-changing moods of this composer’s quicksilver imagination. Let us look at these bars at the end of the first solo from the last movement of Concerto No.IV:
First we have a tumbling downward figure played three times in an ascending sequence, then suddenly three bars of a more lyrical nature appear which are rudely interrupted by an almost grotesque leaping figure, a flighty bar of semiquavers drops in from nowhere to be superceded by bars of a tender and yearning character before the ‘round up’ brings us back to the tutti — and all this in the space of 14 bars!
Passages like this and indeed the Opus 12 set of concertos as a whole show us perhaps the quintessence of Vivaldi’s musical style: an irrepressible imagination allied with a vigorous personality, which led Charles de Brosses, who became friendly with Vivaldi at the very end of his life, to describe him, even then, as having a ‘furie de composition’ — a mania for composing.