Vivaldi in need of OCA music course?
Do you ever get fed up with hearing Antonio Vivaldi’s Four Seasons over and over again? I certainly do. But then I’ve got some history here: I once swapped an LP of those musical seasons for an early Ray Charles album.
Vivaldi
The irony with the over-familiarity of the Four Seasons is that The Red Priest (as Vivaldi was called) actually composed more than 400 concertos. Indeed, he claimed to be able to compose a new work quicker than a copyist could write it out. There really shouldn’t be a problem with finding some different pieces to feature, therefore! However, there remains the suspicion that he was sometimes writing on the 18th Century equivalent of autopilot. Stravinsky once commented – somewhat uncharitably – that it wasn’t a case of Vivaldi composing 400 concertos: more a case of him writing the same concerto 400 times…
I recently played through all of Vivaldi’s Sonatas for Cello and Basso Continuo with a cellist friend (I play the harpsichord). I was disconcerted to find that, although Vivaldi left a bass line by way of an accompaniment, he added very few clues as to the harmonies which continuo players should add so as to flesh out the single written line. Typically composers at this period added numbers and signs to indicate the sort of chords and passing notes the continuo player should use (hence the term ‘figured bass’); but in the Cello Sonatas, Vivaldi left nearly all such decisions up to the continuo player.
You would think that this scope for divergence in interpretation would result in considerable differences in performance, as players instinctively opted for different solutions in the live situation. Sadly, however, many players these days use heavily edited versions of the score. These tend to reveal as much about the creativity (or lack of it) of the editor than the intentions of the composer.
And it’s not only the continuo players who have to make key stylistic decisions during performance, if the Baroque spirit is to be respected. Composers such as Vivaldi would have expected melody line soloists to embellish the sparser passages, especially in repeated sections and slow movements. Right up to the end of the end of the 18th Century, soloists (including Mozart himself, of course) routinely improvised the cadenzas when playing concertos. So all credit to performers such as Andrew Manze (violin), Ton Koopman (harpsichord) and Robert Levin (fortepiano) who follow this convention in live concerts today.
This all raises some fascinating questions about the boundaries between the composer and the performer. But on a more trivial level, I wonder what sort of feedback Vivaldi might have received from his tutor, had he enrolled on an OCA Composing Music Course. I can’t help thinking he might have received some negative comment about a ‘cavalier approach’ and the ‘importance of attention to detail’? Let’s hope not!