Antonio Vivaldi

March 4, 1678 – July 28, 1741

He was born in Venice, Italy. There was an earthquake that shook the city on the day he was born. His father, Giovanni Battista, a professional violinist, taught him to play violin and then toured Venice playing the violin with his young son.

He had a medical problem that he called the tightening of the chest (probably some form of asthma). His medical problem did not prevent him from learning to play the violin, composing, or taking part in many musical activities, but he could not play wind instruments due to his lack of breath. At the age of 15 he began studying to become a priest and was ordained in 1703. Soon after his ordination, he was excused from celebrating the Holy Mass because of his ill health and from that point onward, he withdrew from active practice even though he did remain a priest.

In September 1703, he became master of violin at an orphanage in Venice. In the orphanage and other like it boys learned a trade and had to leave at age 15. The girls received a musical education, and the most talented stayed and became members of the school’s renowned orchestra and choir. Shortly after his appointment, the orphans began to gain appreciation and esteem abroad, too; he wrote most of his concertos, cantatas, and sacred music for them. In 1713, he became responsible for the musical activity of the institution and was promoted to music director in 1716.

In the Venice of the early 18th century, opera was the most popular musical entertainment and the most profitable for the composer, who wrote many operas and other compositions that were performed all over Italy. In 1717 or 1718, he accepted and worked for three years in a prestigious position in the court of the prince Phillip of Hesse-Darmstadt, governor of Mantua. The next big step was a move to Rome in 1722, where the new pope Benedict XIII invited him to play for him. In 1725, he returned to Venice.

It is also in this period that he wrote the Four Seasons: four violin concertos depicting natural scenes in music. The inspiration for them was probably the countryside around Mantua. In them Vivaldi represented flowing creeks, singing birds (of different species, each specifically characterized), barking dogs, buzzing mosquitoes, crying shepherds, storms, drunken dancers, silent nights, hunting parties (both from the hunter's and the prey's point of view), frozen landscapes, children ice-skating, and burning fires.

Despite the success he once enjoyed, however, Vivaldi's life ended in financial difficulties. Changing musical tastes quickly made his music outmoded. Perhaps to meet again with Charles IV, who appreciated his compositions or to stage operas he left Venice and moved to Vienna. However, shortly after his arrival Charles died, leaving the composer without royal protection and a source of income. Vivaldi died not long after, on the night between 27 and July 28, 1741, of “internal infection“. On July 28 he was buried in a simple grave at the Hospital Burial Ground in Vienna. Vivaldi's funeral took place at St. Stephen's Cathedral, where the young Joseph Haydn was then a choir boy. The cost of his funeral included a Kleinglaut, or pauper's peal of bells.