Antonio Vivaldi, “Autumn” from the Four Seasons

August 19, 2024

Date of Publication: 1725
Duration: 11 minutes

Venetian composer Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741) is closely associated with the genre of concerto, and for good reason. The Baroque musician composed more than five hundred of these instrumental features. Two-thirds were created for a soloist with ensemble, and of these, a large portion were written to showcase his own instrument, the violin. Vivaldi, well known as a virtuoso, probably performed many of his own works, but he also composed pieces to be played by his female students at the Ospedale della Pietà, a well-funded orphanage. In addition to violin, Vivaldi wrote concertos for bassoon, flute, cello, and oboe, as well as instruments less common in today’s concert hall such as the mandolin, recorder, and viola d’amore. In these solo works, he established a standard format of three movements (fast-slow-fast), often with memorable ritornello (reoccurring) sections played by the ensemble.

Of all of Vivaldi’s hundreds of concertos, the most famous are part of a set titled Le quattro stagioni, or The Four Seasons, published Amsterdam in 1725. Each of the Four Seasons concertos is connected to a sonnet evoking the season it portrays. Vivaldi recreated birds and thunderstorms (Spring), icy snow and stinging winds (Winter), and a cuckoo’s call through oppressive heat (Summer), among other masterful effects. The ensemble creates an overall thematic mood, while the soloist’s interjections more closely align musically to the words of each sonnet’s fourteen lines, spread sonically across the given season’s three movements. “L’autonno” (Autumn) opens to celebratory sounds of a successful harvest. The second movement then slows to ponder the wonder of the crisp fall air, before a lusty finale takes the audience on a romp through the hunting grounds of eighteenth-century Italy.

(Allegro)
The peasant celebrates with dances and songs
The pleasure of a bountiful harvest.
And fired up by the liquor of Bacchus,
their revelry ends with sleep.

(Adagio molto)
Make everyone leave aside their song and dance.
The temperate air gives pleasure,
And the season invites many
from their sweet slumber to beautiful enjoyment.

(Allegro)
The hunters are hunting at the new dawn,
come out with horns and dogs and guns.
The beast flees, and they follow the trail;
Already shocked and left to the great noise
of guns and dogs, threatened by injury,
languid to flee, but oppressed, she dies.

© 2024, Dr. K. Dawn Grapes