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“The Four Seasons” movements are actually part of a larger body of 12 total concertos, including "The Four Seasons." The larger work is called, “Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione,” or, “The Contest Between Harmony and Invention.” Speaking of invention and innovation.
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No one is sure where the sonnets originate, so most historians allude to the rumor that Vivaldi wrote the sonnets himself.Ĭlick here to read the sonnets in both Italian and English.
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However, "The Four Seasons" was a musical score created to honor four descriptive sonnets about each season (four sonnets in all). In fact, that style of performance wasn’t made popular until the Romantic era. You’re probably familiar with the concept of a “music program,” where the music aligns with a specific text.
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One of the reasons Vivaldi’s Four Seasons was so unique is that it was one of the first classical compositions to implement and follow a dynamic music program. That said, the first performances in Italy, France, and throughout the European continent had frequent concert-attendees and music theorists up in arms about what to make of his newfangled musical notions. Unlike those composers, however, historians cannot claim that Vivialid’s “The Four Seasons” caused any riots. Other “radical” classical composers of their time periods include Mozart and Stravinsky. Young people in the 21st-century can have a difficult time envisioning any piece of music as “radical.” In the world of contemporary pop culture, “radical” music means the inclusion of profanity, pejoratives, or rebellious language and sentiments.ĭuring the Baroque period, the idea of radical music was anything that veered from the traditional way of doing things. Today, we want to focus on the story of “The Four Seasons.” Vivaldi’s "Four Seasons": a radical violin concerto Read our post 17 Amazing Facts About Vivaldi to learn more about the composer. The most famous of all of Vivaldi’s works is "The Four Seasons” (“Le quattro stagioni”) violin concerto. About 230 of those concertos were written for the violin. Antonio Vivaldi (1678 - 1741) was a prolific, 18th-century Baroque composer who wrote more than 500 concertos.
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