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Vivaldi - Spring from The Four Seasons (II. Largo)
Sheet music for violin
| Alt. Title: | La primavera (Spring) from Le quattro stagioni; Violin Concerto in E Major |
|---|---|
| Info: | The Four Seasons (Italian: Le quattro stagioni) is a group of four violin concertos by the Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi, each of which gives musical expression to a season of the year. They were composed around 1718 to 1720, when Vivaldi was the master of the court chapel in Mantua. They were published in 1725 in Amsterdam, along with eight additional concertos such as Il cement dell'armonia and dell'inventione. The Four Seasons is Vivaldi's best-known work. While three of the concerts are entirely original, the first, "Spring," borrows patterns from a symphony in the first act of Vivaldi's contemporary opera Il Giustino. The inspiration for the concerts is not the countryside around Mantua, as initially supposed, where Vivaldi lived at the time, as, according to Karl Heller, they could have been written as early as 1716-1717, while Vivaldi was involved with the court of Mantua only in 1718. They were a revolution in musical conception: in them Vivaldi represented streams, birds singing (of different species, each specifically different), a shepherd and his dog barking, buzzing flies, storms, drunken dancers, hunting parties of both hunters and the prey point of view, frozen landscapes and warm winter fires. Unusual for the time, Vivaldi published the concerts accompanied by sonnets (possibly by the composer himself) that elucidated what was in the spirit of each season that his music was intended to evoke. The concert, therefore, is one of the earliest and most detailed examples of what would come to be called program music - in other words, music with a narrative element. Vivaldi took the trouble to relate his music to the texts of the poems, translating his own poetic lines directly into the music on the page. For example, in the middle section of "Spring", when the shepherd sleeps, his dog barking can be heard in the viola section. The music is elsewhere similarly evocative of other natural sounds. Vivaldi divided each concerto into three movements (fast-slow-fast) and, similarly, each linked sonnet into three sections. |
| Opus number: | RV 269; Op.8 No.1 |
| Date: | 1720 |
| Artist: | Antonio Lucio Vivaldi |
| Born: | 4 March 1678, Venice |
| Died: | 28 July 1741, Vienna |
| The artist: | Italian Baroque composer, virtuoso violinist, teacher and cleric. Vivaldi was a very prolific composer and had some 500 concertos to his credit. |
| Instrument: | Violin |
| Key: | E major |
| Range: | G#4 - C#6 |
| Time signature: | 3/4 |
| Tempo: | 48 BPM |
| Duration: | 2:26 |
| Pages: | 1 |
| Difficulty: | Easy |
| Style: | Classical |
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