In Spring’s first movement, the first tutti is the arrival of the season, while the first solo section represents the birds greeting it. They would have been keenly aware that the sounds they were making represented specific scenes. But in Vivaldi’s day the audience for his publications consisted mostly of accomplished amateur players, who could play the Four Seasons with as many players as could gather around the part-books, or as few as six, as the highlight of a social gathering. This is something that can pass unnoticed by the modern audience, which consists of listeners who aren’t looking at the music on the page. The sonnet verses are printed not only as prefaces to each concerto, but also in all the instrumental parts, in the midst of tempo and dynamic markings.

Vivaldi included a sonnet for each concerto explaining what was going on, supplying not just descriptions, but performance instructions.

The feature of the Four Seasons that drew the most positive and negative attention when they were new was the one aspect that was largely ignored when, after two centuries of obscurity, they started to get played again in the 1950s and 1960s: their pictorial literalness. Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) was as controversial and polarizing a figure in his time as Beethoven and Wagner in theirs.

8 (the title “Four Seasons” was not used), they were viewed as crazy modern music, or facile curiosities, or tasteless gimmickry, or the way of the future, and pretty much everything in between. Yet in 1725, when Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter were published as the first four concertos of his Op. There are perhaps 200 different recordings that can be purchased at the moment (reissues, anthologies, and excerpts make an exact count difficult), and it accounts for about half the 174 appearances Vivaldi’s music has made in movies and television, according to Internet Movie Database. Its strains are part of the sounds of modern life, heard on the radio and in department stores and elevators. This concert, and the concept behind it, came into being largely because Vivaldi’s Four Seasons has become profoundly embedded in modern culture.

Antonio vivaldi four seasons