The 16th century Italian poet Giovan Battista Marino sustained that a poet’s aim should be to create maraviglia – marvel! This might be a description of the aesthetics of Corelli’s Concerti grossi and Vivaldi’s Quattro stagioni. Marvels and sumptuous sound belonged rightly in the Roman and Venetian palaces where these compositions were born and played, swiftly imposing themselves as models for the sound of music throughout Europe.
In the space of a few years Corelli’s works – his opera omnia – were enjoying spreading success in Great Britain, and so were Vivaldi’s. Their manuscripts were the boast of Dutch music publishers. Corelli kept his Concerti grossi op. VI in manuscript form for decades – they were published posthumously in 1714 in Amsterdam – because he was constantly working on the music and in fact in the Arcadia Academy in Rome he admitted he was a perfectionist. His masterpieces were frequently heard at open-air festivities in Rome’s courtyards and gardens and even during official ceremonies at the Campidoglio. This music relies on the contrast between slow and fast movements, alternating concertino – the three soloists, and ripieno – the rest of the orchestra, and on the rich beauty of the sound, following the model of the great Roman polyphony.
Vivaldi’s Le quattro stagioni was published in Amsterdam in 1725, after what we might now call a “publicity campaign”, but the music was already familiar to foreign appassionati and soon found its way into the libraries of the Roman cardinals. The “red priest” – known for his ginger hair – called them “concerti figurati”, a sort of musical theatre for the entertainment of noble courts. Sonnets – some maybe by Vivaldi himself – and other explanatory tricks helped the spectator feel like a participant in the vivid, dense, suggestive sound, a bit like looking at the Venetian view painters’ works.
The solo violin, showing off his virtuoso skills in the famous Concerto in D, RV 212, with its popular cadenza, accompanies us along this imaginative path, through the extreme seasons. In the Summer languidezza per il caldo – “languid with the heat” is the first title and the Winter finds the listener agghiacciato tremar tra nevi algenti – “trembling icily in the freezing snow”; Spring and Autumn are more serene but there is still a Tempesta, perhaps the link between all four Stagioni.

Carlo Bellora