Posted on 10/04/2005 3:25:15 PM PDT by sitetest
Antonio Vivaldi's desperate final year was spent far from home, trying to establish himself in Vienna. He was banned from his artistic stronghold in Ferrara because word was out that this ordained priest had a longstanding relationship with his leading soprano.
In his native Venice — scene of many feast-and-famine episodes — Vivaldi had long been considered washed up. Financially strapped, he sold bundles of concertos in Vienna, but his ambitions, there and most everywhere in his professional life, lay in opera. After those hopes died in 1741, so did he.
Though he is known among both mainstream and crossover audiences as the concerto machine that produced The Four Seasons, the world is only now discovering how much Vivaldi's life was about opera. In a period when few opera recordings are made, Vivaldi's have been entering the market at the rate of two or three a year.
Just as Handel operas were the great discovery of the late 20th century, Vivaldi's — which may number as many as 94 — may find their vogue in the 21st.
The musical allure is there, with rhythmic propulsion, uncomplicated Italianate tunefulness, and piquant descriptive effects, plus an attractive sort of attention-deficit disorder manifested in a refusal to stay with one idea for very long. In opera, all these qualities are put at the service of telling stories, whereas the racing ostinatos of Vivaldi's concertos characterize anxiety, anticipation and desperation.
"Nobody writes 'water' better than Vivaldi," says soprano Julianne Baird, a Baroque specialist and professor of music at Rutgers University who will sing Vivaldi with the Philadelphia Classical Symphony on October 21. "He understands rains and storms, going across a wake on the water ... and going down the drain."
Yet is Vivaldi's allure stageworthy? Operas by major composers such as Franz Josef Haydn and Franz Schubert have been praised in recordings, but are too dramatically hobbled to graduate to mainstream opera stages. Vivaldi's stage fate is yet to be decided.
Vivaldi's operas have an added problem: Their scores are often unpublished and full of gaping holes. The recently discovered Motezuma is missing its first seven scenes. So these operas are hardly ready-made sleeping beauties, though bits and pieces are coming together as European libraries examine holdings confiscated during World War II and returned from the former Soviet Union.
"Vivaldi discoveries are simply tumbling out of the cupboard at the moment," said University of Liverpool professor and Vivaldi scholar Michael Talbot in an e-mail interview. "This year, we have had an 11-movement Dixit Dominus and a one-movement Lauda Jerusalem, both in Dresden, and a recorder sonata in Berlin. One, possibly two, concertos may be on the way from Slovakia."
Once discovered, though, the operas are dogged by ethical issues. Andromeda liberata, one such find, arrived with great fanfare last year on a Deutsche Grammophon recording — amid revelations that much of it isn't by Vivaldi. But what might smell like shabby artistic practices in the 21st century was business as usual in the alien operatic universe that Vivaldi inhabited.
"Nearly all operas in the period of 1730–50 were to some degree — even if only to a slight degree — 'pasticcios,' operas with earlier music by the same composer or by one or more different composers," says Talbot. "Exactly the same thing happens in many modern musicals and pantomimes, by the way."
Still, Vivaldi's sampling violates the deeply held Mozart/Wagner ideal: that an opera is so organically conceived that its components are anything but interchangeable. Hearing a Vivaldi opera, one can say, "I didn't know he could write music like that" — and the truth may be that he didn't.
In effect, Vivaldi redefines what constitutes a compositional act. In accommodating the needs of singers, censors and shifting tastes, he was something of an executive composer, his artistic expression extending to his choice of appropriate music by others. To his credit, he wasn't just slapping stray arias into service, but adapting and revising them.
"The result is not necessarily bad," says Talbot, "since Baroque operas are in a very real sense modular compositions that built upwards from their basic units — recitatives and arias — rather than downwards from an overall vision of the work."
In other words, content dictated form. Also, Vivaldi consistently wrote his own conversational, plot-advancing recitatives, which carry much dramatic weight; Mozart, in contrast, farmed his out to a pupil if time was tight.
There's another lingering taint. At a time when Venice had as many opera houses as Broadway has theaters, Vivaldi never broke into the patrician echelon. But the fact that Vivaldi was considered a bit downmarket may be why his operas are more revivable than those of his more-esteemed contemporaries, who had to distort their vision to answer the needs of expensive vocal superstars.
Vivaldi maintained more control. And though there are always passages of autopilot — plus déjà-vu moments that echo The Four Seasons — Vivaldi's best operas aren't patchworks but have identities unto themselves.
To convey its Turkish setting, Bajazet favors layers of color in its orchestration. The lighter-weight Andromeda liberata consistently exudes the charm of Italian song. For whatever reasons, La verità in cimento frequently shifts between major and minor keys, suggesting shades of emotional ambiguity that his other operas do not.
While many of these pieces aren't new to CD, their mode of performance is. Present-day Europe is full of super-virtuosic Baroque specialists — the Venice Baroque Orchestra (directed by Andrea Marcon), Concerto Italiano (Rinaldo Alessandrini), and Europa Galante (Fabio Biondi) — that love crackling tempos and have singers who can meet their steepest demands, such as Vivica Genaux, David Daniels, and, most remarkable, 27-year-old French countertenor Philippe Jaroussky.
Among them, one thing is apparent: Vivaldi doesn't thrive on politeness. The music's energy is volatile, even violent. Indeed, Vivaldi had to have been a scrappy character. He brought himself up from humble beginnings, spent his Venetian opera career dodging numerous bullets, bragged that he could compose faster than his copyists could take it down, and blatantly disregarded his priestly vows.
When Neapolitan-style opera was invading Venetian theaters, Vivaldi practiced guerrilla warfare: Bajazet has sympathetic characters singing his music and bad guys singing music of his rival composers. His aggressive personality rings so clearly in the 21st century that Vivaldi's defeats of the 1740s may prove to have been setbacks that were merely temporary.
Vivaldi on CD: Five finest Listen to samples of Vivaldi at http://go.philly.com/opera
Well, either way, I can't complain.
Dear Admin Moderator,
I goofed with the link to the article - I accidentally linked a different article at the same source. Could you correct it, please?
The correct link is:
http://www.andante.com/article/article.cfm?id=26028
If this can't be corrected, well, my apologies to everyone.
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Thanks!
... especially the Concertos for Mandolines!
Me, too!
Vivaldi is a brilliant musical genius who achieved the penultimate in Baroque music. He is under appreciated and this is truly welcome news.
I think this is pretty exciting. I love the visual of Vivaldi works tumbling out of cupboards.
The recording of the Concerto for Diverse Instruments in C Major (RV 558) will take your breath away. This recording with period instruments, crackling speeds and authentic Baroque performance practice is several orders of magnitude better than Leonard Bernstein's 1959 recording with some first chair players of the New York Philharmonic of that era.
Dear Publius,
I can attest to the wonderfulness of this CD. I really loved Vivaldi before getting it, but was positively enraptured afterwards.
sitetest
Dear Admin Moderator,
Thanks for the fix.
sitetest
No. However, he might be opera fans next fad.
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