A Spring With a Poem in the Score

Imagine opening a part and finding a poem printed among the notes. That is what players got when they opened Vivaldi's set of concertos published in Amsterdam in 1725.

This is the second stop. Let me introduce an Italian of my own generation, Antonio Vivaldi. Born in Venice, he was an ordained priest, and because of his red hair people called him "the Red Priest." For many years he worked at the Ospedale della Pietà in Venice, a home that cared for girls without parents. Its all-female orchestra was so famous that visitors to Venice made a point of going to hear it.

The first four concertos of that collection are the ones we now call The Four Seasons. Each comes with a sonnet, a short poem of fourteen lines. Nobody knows for certain who wrote them, and some think Vivaldi wrote them himself. Here is the clever part: each line of the poem is marked with a letter, and the same letter appears at the matching place in the music. The score is practically saying, "Birds here. Thunder here."

The Spring sonnet begins, "Spring has arrived." Birds greet it with happy song, streams murmur in the soft breeze, then the sky turns dark and thunder and lightning break out. When the storm passes, the birds start singing again.

The music follows every scene. But Vivaldi does more than narrate. A sturdy spring theme, played by the whole orchestra, keeps returning between the scenes and holds the piece together. That returning theme was the backbone of the concertos Vivaldi loved to write.