The Red Priest of Venice
Antonio Vivaldi – red-haired, ordained, and impossible to overlook – was the most dazzling violinist of baroque Venice and the composer who made the concerto what it is today. His set of four violin concertos The Four Seasons may be the most instantly recognizable music ever written: three hundred years on, its storms, birdsong and summer thunder still open films, fill concert halls and stop people mid-scroll. Yet the man behind it spent most of his career in the least glamorous job imaginable: teaching music at an orphanage.
Music for orphan girls
For nearly four decades Vivaldi worked at the Ospedale della Pietà, a Venetian charitable institution for abandoned girls, training its remarkable all-female orchestra and choir. The girls performed behind wrought-iron grilles, unseen – and Europe's aristocracy travelled to Venice just to hear them. It was largely for these musicians that Vivaldi poured out roughly five hundred concertos, pushing the violin to new virtuosic heights and painting pictures in sound that nobody had attempted before. Fame, however, proved fickle: tastes changed, and in 1741 Vivaldi died impoverished in Vienna and was buried in a simple hospital graveyard. His music lay forgotten for nearly two centuries, until a sensational rediscovery of his manuscripts in the 1920s returned him to the first rank of composers – where he has stayed ever since.
Vivaldi and Prague
Prague knew Vivaldi's worth while he was still alive. In the 1730s the opera house of Count Franz Anton Sporck – the same Bohemian patron who corresponded with Bach – hosted a Venetian company that staged a series of Vivaldi's operas, and his opera Argippo received its world premiere in Prague in 1730. The score later vanished; rediscovered almost three centuries later, it was brought back to life by Czech musicians. Today Vivaldi is woven into the city's concert life more tightly than ever: The Four Seasons rings out in Prague's baroque halls and churches virtually every evening, played in spaces the same age as the music itself.