ALC 0174 Vivaldi: The Four Seasons & Concertos, RV 565 & RV 522

The Seasons “for All Seasons” As soon as one entertains the belief that there is nothing new to say about Antonio Vivaldi’s Quattro Stagioni, something always turns up to disprove it. For a long time, the fact that this cycle of concertos portrays not only familiar, positive themes and images taken from the traditional literature and iconography depicting the four seasons (birds in spring, breezes in summer, hunts in autumn, cosiness by the fire in winter) but also, in two concertos, unfamiliar, negative ones (excessive heat in summer, slippery ground underfoot in winter) has seemed puzzling. But very recent research identifying Vivaldi’s lifelong illness, (described by him as a strettezza di petto) as the
Eisenmenger Syndrome, a condition arising from insufficient development of the lungs at the time of birth, at last clarifies the deeply personal reason for these additions: sufferers from this condition fare much worse in extremes of heat or cold than in temperate spring and autumn. The rather convoluted history of the Stagioni is basically this: around 1720 Vivaldi began to write the four concertos, which, as a completed manuscript set, were sold to one of his main patrons at that time, Count Wenzel von Morzin, who maintained a private orchestra in Prague. In the concertos’ original form, the things and persons illustrated were identified by means of short captions. However, when Vivaldi decided at a
late stage to dedicate the concertos in his Op. 8 published collection (1725) to the same Morzin, he realized that he needed to provide the Stagioni with added value in order not to be seen to be seeking a second reward for exactly the same product. The additions were a set of four sonnets written on the concertos (probably by Vivaldi himself) plus cue-letters adjoining the lines of verse serving as a means of matching the words of the poetry to the musical notes. It appears that the engraver for the Amsterdam publisher had already produced plates with the original captions, so these now had to be supplemented by the cue-letters and extracts from the sonnets. Miraculously, the returning engraver succeeded in finding room for everything, even though the result is inelegant to the eye.