The Four Seasons (Vivaldi)
The Four Seasons (Italian: Le quattro stagioni) is a
group of four violin concerti by Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi, each of
which gives a musical expression to a season of the year. They were written
about 1723 and were published in 1725 in Amsterdam, together with eight
additional violin concerti, as Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione
("The Contest Between Harmony and Invention").
The Four Seasons is the best known of Vivaldi's works.
Unusually for the time, Vivaldi published the concerti with accompanying poems
(possibly written by Vivaldi himself) that elucidated what it was about those
seasons that his music was intended to evoke. It provides one of the earliest
and most-detailed examples of what was later called program music—music with a
narrative element.
Vivaldi took great pains to relate his music to the texts
of the poems, translating the poetic lines themselves directly into the music
on the page. In the middle section of the Spring concerto, where the goatherd
sleeps, his barking dog can be marked in the viola section. Other natural
occurrences are similarly evoked. Vivaldi separated each concerto into three
movements, fast-slow-fast, and likewise each linked sonnet into three sections.
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