Besides Vivaldi’s musical genius and passion for opera, his appreciation for women and what they could set Vivaldi apart from many of his contemporaries. Vivaldi composed 'The Four Seasons' between 1720 and 1723 while employed at “El Pio Ospedale della Pieta,” which was a girls school dedicated to orphaned girls. He worked as the Maestro de Violino (violin teacher) there and wrote some of his most famous. Allegro 'Caccia'. Vivaldi - The Four Seasons 'Winter' - I. Allegro non molto. Vivaldi - The Four Seasons 'Winter' - II. Vivaldi - The Four Seasons 'Winter' - III. Get access to Vivaldi – The Four Seasons and thousands of sheet music titles free of charge for 14 days!
At-A-Glance
About this Piece
By 1725, when Vivaldi published his Opus 8, a set of 12 concertos entitled The Contest between Harmony and Invention, he may well have been the most famous musician in Europe, and the first four concertos of the set, named Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter, were already well known from circulating manuscript copies.
Part of their appeal would doubtless have been their extra-musical content. Vivaldi was hardly the first composer to depict nature and human activities in instrumental music, but no one had conjured the physical world quite so vividly and concisely with violins before. He wrote a sonnet for each concerto explaining what was going on, intended not only as description, but as instruction for performance: the sonnet verses are printed not only as prefaces to each concerto, but also in all the instrumental parts, in the midst of tempo markings and performance directions.
In Spring’s first movement, we hear the arrival of Spring, the birds greeting it (first solo), brooks and breezes, and a quick thunderstorm. In the slow movement, a goatherd sleeps under a tree while the second violins represent “the murmuring branches and leaves” and the viola’s repeated notes represent his “faithful dog” (whining or barking, depending on how violists understand the word “grida” written in their part). The finale is a big dance accompanied by bagpipes, which are represented by droning basses.
In Summer, the opening bars present the “merciless summer sun” and “man and flock” sweltering under it. In the first solo, the violin is an ornamented cuckoo — it’s the soloist’s task to make the cuckoo’s notes distinct in a barrage of 16th-notes. The second solo depicts the turtledove and goldfinch, and rustling of the gentle Zephyr breeze, which is joined by the violent north wind. The wind subsides long enough to let us hear how it makes a shepherd fear a coming storm, his agitated state depicted in a sequence of chromatically descending diminished chords — dissonances that lead to other dissonances instead of resolving. Vivaldi was capable of great harmonic (and contrapuntal) sophistication when it suited his purpose, and there are passages in the Four Seasons that could easily be mistaken for something written a century after his death. The second movement depicts the gentle, buzzing insects, and the shepherd listening with apprehension to distant thunder. In the third movement we get thunder, lightning, and hail.
Autumn begins with a celebration of the harvest in a vigorous dance that loses its energy as the peasants get drunk and fall asleep. In the slow movement the sonnet speaks of revelers enjoying “sweet sleep” in the “mild and pleasant” air, but the music is mysterious and dreamlike: virtually the entire movement is another sequence of unresolved dissonances. The physical world, and the aristocracy, barge in with the horn calls of a hunt in the third movement. We hear the prey flee from gunshots and barking hounds, and finally tire and die.
Winter depicts shivering (yet another remarkable chain of dissonances), chattering teeth, and “running and stamping your feet every moment” to keep warm in snow and biting wind. Venice, at about the same latitude as Portland or Minneapolis, can get serious winter weather. The slow movement is a cozy indoor scene by the fire “while the rain drenches everyone outside,” the raindrops in pizzicato under the solo violin’s melody. The finale begins by painting a picture of trying to walk on ice without slipping, not always successfully, and concludes with the onslaught of “Sirocco, Boreas and the other winds at war.”
For those with enough skill, the four concertos are great fun to play, which would have ensured popularity in the 18th century, when instrumental proficiency was common among people with money. Of course, not everyone liked them. Geminiani, the Corellian conservative, complained that “Imitating the Cock, Cuckoo, Owl and other birds, and also sudden Shifts of the Hand from one extremity of the Finger-board to the other,” were “Tricks that rather belong to the Professors of Legerdemain and Posture-makers than to the art of Musick.” Geminiani inveighing against Vivaldi sounds not unlike the 19th-century classicists inveighing against Wagner and Liszt, and just as ineffectively.
By 1725, when Vivaldi published his Opus 8, a set of 12 concertos entitled The Contest between Harmony and Invention, he may well have been the most famous musician in Europe, and the first four concertos of the set, named Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter, were already well known from circulating manuscript copies.
Part of their appeal would doubtless have been their extra-musical content. Vivaldi was hardly the first composer to depict nature and human activities in instrumental music, but no one had conjured the physical world quite so vividly and concisely with violins before. He wrote a sonnet for each concerto explaining what was going on, intended not only as description, but as instruction for performance: the sonnet verses are printed not only as prefaces to each concerto, but also in all the instrumental parts, in the midst of tempo markings and performance directions.
In Spring’s first movement, we hear the arrival of Spring, the birds greeting it (first solo), brooks and breezes, and a quick thunderstorm. In the slow movement, a goatherd sleeps under a tree while the second violins represent “the murmuring branches and leaves” and the viola’s repeated notes represent his “faithful dog” (whining or barking, depending on how violists understand the word “grida” written in their part). The finale is a big dance accompanied by bagpipes, which are represented by droning basses.
In Summer, the opening bars present the “merciless summer sun” and “man and flock” sweltering under it. In the first solo, the violin is an ornamented cuckoo — it’s the soloist’s task to make the cuckoo’s notes distinct in a barrage of 16th-notes. The second solo depicts the turtledove and goldfinch, and rustling of the gentle Zephyr breeze, which is joined by the violent north wind. The wind subsides long enough to let us hear how it makes a shepherd fear a coming storm, his agitated state depicted in a sequence of chromatically descending diminished chords — dissonances that lead to other dissonances instead of resolving. Vivaldi was capable of great harmonic (and contrapuntal) sophistication when it suited his purpose, and there are passages in the Four Seasons that could easily be mistaken for something written a century after his death. The second movement depicts the gentle, buzzing insects, and the shepherd listening with apprehension to distant thunder. In the third movement we get thunder, lightning, and hail.
Autumn begins with a celebration of the harvest in a vigorous dance that loses its energy as the peasants get drunk and fall asleep. In the slow movement the sonnet speaks of revelers enjoying “sweet sleep” in the “mild and pleasant” air, but the music is mysterious and dreamlike: virtually the entire movement is another sequence of unresolved dissonances. The physical world, and the aristocracy, barge in with the horn calls of a hunt in the third movement. We hear the prey flee from gunshots and barking hounds, and finally tire and die.
Winter depicts shivering (yet another remarkable chain of dissonances), chattering teeth, and “running and stamping your feet every moment” to keep warm in snow and biting wind. Venice, at about the same latitude as Portland or Minneapolis, can get serious winter weather. The slow movement is a cozy indoor scene by the fire “while the rain drenches everyone outside,” the raindrops in pizzicato under the solo violin’s melody. The finale begins by painting a picture of trying to walk on ice without slipping, not always successfully, and concludes with the onslaught of “Sirocco, Boreas and the other winds at war.”
For those with enough skill, the four concertos are great fun to play, which would have ensured popularity in the 18th century, when instrumental proficiency was common among people with money. Of course, not everyone liked them. Geminiani, the Corellian conservative, complained that “Imitating the Cock, Cuckoo, Owl and other birds, and also sudden Shifts of the Hand from one extremity of the Finger-board to the other,” were “Tricks that rather belong to the Professors of Legerdemain and Posture-makers than to the art of Musick.” Geminiani inveighing against Vivaldi sounds not unlike the 19th-century classicists inveighing against Wagner and Liszt, and just as ineffectively.
PrintOur editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.
Join Britannica's Publishing Partner Program and our community of experts to gain a global audience for your work! Betsy SchwarmThe Four Seasons, Italian Le quattro stagioni, group of four violinconcerti by Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi, each of which gives a musical expression to a season of the year. They were written about 1720 and were published in 1725 (Amsterdam), together with eight additional violin concerti, as Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione (“The Contest Between Harmony and Invention”).
The Four Seasons is the best known of Vivaldi’s works. Unusually for the time, Vivaldi published the concerti with accompanying poems (possibly written by Vivaldi himself) that elucidated what it was about those seasons that his music was intended to evoke. It provides one of the earliest and most-detailed examples of what was later called program music—music with a narrative element.
Vivaldi took great pains to relate his music to the texts of the poems, translating the poetic lines themselves directly into the music on the page. In the middle section of the Springconcerto, where the goatherd sleeps, his barking dog can be marked in the viola section. Other natural occurrences are similarly evoked. Vivaldi separated each concerto into three movements, fast-slow-fast, and likewise each linked sonnet into three sections. His arrangement is as follows:
Spring (Concerto No. 1 in E Major)
Allegro
Spring has arrived with joy
Welcomed by the birds with happy songs,
And the brooks, amidst gentle breezes,
Murmur sweetly as they flow.
The sky is caped in black, and
Thunder and lightning herald a storm
When they fall silent, the birds
Take up again their delightful songs.
Largo e pianissimo sempre
And in the pleasant, blossom-filled meadow,
To the gentle murmur of leaves and plants,
The goatherd sleeps, his faithful dog beside him.
Allegro
To the merry sounds of a rustic bagpipe,
Nymphs and shepherds dance in their beloved spot
When Spring appears in splendour.
Summer (Concerto No. 2 in G Minor)
Allegro non molto
Under the merciless sun of the season
Languishes man and flock, the pine tree burns.
The cuckoo begins to sing and at once
Join in the turtledove and the goldfinch.
A gentle breeze blows, but Boreas
Is roused to combat suddenly with his neighbour,
And the shepherd weeps because overhead
Hangs the fearsome storm, and his destiny.
Adagio
His tired limbs are robbed of rest
By his fear of the lightning and the frightful thunder
And by the flies and hornets in furious swarms.
Presto
Alas, his fears come true:
There is thunder and lightning in the heavens
And the hail cuts down the tall ears of grain.
Autumn (Concerto No. 3 in F Major)Winter (Concerto No. 4 in F Minor)
Allegro
The peasant celebrates with dancing and singing
The pleasure of the rich harvest,
And full of the liquor of Bacchus
They end their merrymaking with a sleep.
Adagio molto
All are made to leave off dancing and singing
By the air which, now mild, gives pleasure
And by the season, which invites many
To find their pleasure in a sweet sleep.
Allegro
The hunters set out at dawn, off to the hunt,
With horns and guns and dogs they venture out.
The beast flees and they are close on its trail.
Already terrified and wearied by the great noise
Of the guns and dogs, and wounded as well
It tries feebly to escape, but is bested and dies.
Allegro non molto
Frozen and shivering in the icy snow,
In the severe blasts of a terrible wind
Vivaldi Four Seasons Free
To run stamping one’s feet each moment,One’s teeth chattering through the cold.
Largo
To spend quiet and happy times by the fire
While outside the rain soaks everyone.
Allegro
To walk on the ice with tentative steps,
Going carefully for fear of falling. To go in haste, slide, and fall down to the ground,
Play The Four Seasons By Vivaldi Songs
To go again on the ice and run,
In case the ice cracks and opens.
To hear leaving their iron-gated house Sirocco,
Boreas, and all the winds in battle—
This is winter, but it brings joy.