Composed 1716-17; 40 minutes 

Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons are the first in a collection of twelve concertos published in 1725 as his Op. 8, titled Il cimento dell’ armonia e dell’ inventione (The contest between harmony and invention).  The first four concertos show how a composer can explore the connections between the rational side of music (harmony) and fantasy.  With The Four Seasons, there is a close connection between words and music.  Vivaldi himself is believed to have written four sonnets that preface the score and when the time came for the music to be printed, Vivaldi made the connection clear by printing lines of the sonnet alongside specific musical phrases.   

The basic structure of each concerto follows the pattern that Vivaldi had already established in other solo concertos – that of two fast outer movements, framing a slower middle movement.  The fast movements include recurring ritornelli (literally ‘little returns’) where the full orchestra returns regularly with familiar material.  In between these passages are episodes featuring the soloist.  In the Spring concerto, Vivaldi uses the episodes to portray, in turn, birdsong, the murmuring of the waves, the blowing of breezes, the approaching storm with thunder and lightning, then the return of birdsong.   

The middle movements generally explore a single mood.  Even so, Vivaldi creates a true soundscape of ideas in the slow movement of Spring.  We hear simultaneously the rustling of leaves (with a gently rocking rhythm on violins), the peaceful song of a sleeping goatherd and, even more unusually, the barking of a dog (woof-woof, woof-woof, woof-woof), heard on violas, who are instructed to play molto forte e strappato, ‘very loud and rough.’   The imagery in The Four Seasons remains fresh and vivid today, more than three centuries after the concertos are believed to have been written.  In Summer, the shepherd trembles (halting violins) in fear of the thunder (lower strings play close to the bridge) and the flash of lightning, while insects buzz around angrily.  In Autumn, hunters gather at dawn, with horn calls (solo violin in thirds, fourths and fifths), guns firing, dogs baying in excitement (repeated thirds) and their prey trying vainly to escape (triplets in the solo violin).  From the bright F major key of la caccia, Vivaldi turns to the darker, more desolate key of F minor for Winter.  Now we shiver against the icy wind (frosty string notes clash together) and stamp our feet (accented notes).   

Vivaldi’s understanding of our relationship with Nature is as current today as ever.  His music is not merely pictorial representation in music or programmatic music of the most obvious sort.  It shares something of the ideals of program music in the romantic era which, as we heard Beethoven represent it, is “more an expression of feeling than painting.”   

— Notes by Keith Horner