Notes for: July 15, 2008
Vivaldi spent 37 years as the director of music at the Ospedale della Pieta, one of four schools in Venice for illegitimate, orphaned and deserted youngsters. The schools were attached to hospitals or charitable hostels, and their students were educated and maintained mainly at the state’s expense. The boys were apprenticed out to Venetian merchants and tradesmen to prepare them to become self-supporting. The girls, on the other hand, were cloistered like nuns and trained in music mainly as a way of attracting eligible young men for marriage.
The standards of music education at Vivaldi’s school were particularly high. The schools’ academic costs were heavily subsidized by the proceeds of regular Sunday concerts by the Ospedale’s orchestra and choir, usually but not always performing behind screens to protect the girls’ modesty. Under Vivaldi’s direction, these concerts became the talk of Venice, and no foreign visitor left the city without having attended a Vivaldi performance. In the words of one English visitor:
The girls sing like angels, play the violin, flute, organ, oboe, cello, bassoon – in short no instrument is large enough to frighten them. The performances are entirely their own and each concert is composed of about forty girls. I swear nothing is more charming than to see a young and pretty nun, dressed in white, a sprig of pomegranate blossom behind one ear, leading the orchestra and beating time with all the grace and precision imaginable.
For the concerts Vivaldi wrote some 500 concertos for various solo instruments, or combinations of solo instruments, and string orchestra. About one-half of them were for violin – hardly surprising considering that Vivaldi was a celebrated violinist. The rest included works for bassoon, cello, oboe, flute, viola d’amore, recorder and mandolin.
In addition, Vivaldi wrote three concertos for “flautino” and orchestra, including the one we hear this evening. Since the term “flautino” was not generally used in Vivaldi’s day, scholars have speculated ever since about what instrument Vivaldi had in mind. The leading candidates are the small sopranino recorder and the flageolet, an end-blown flute, but the former is usually preferred since Vivaldi specifically designated the flageolet when he used it.
At any rate, later in the 18th century the transverse flute replaced both the recorder and the flageolet in general use, and a new edition of RV 443 was published for the piccolo, a member of the flute family. That is the version that we hear this evening.
In his instrumental concertos, Vivaldi perfected the form of what would become the Baroque instrumental concerto. First of all, he standardized the use of three movements in a fast-slow-fast pattern. Second, he developed the ritornello (“little return”) form, in which the full body of instruments, known as the tutti, alternates with the solo instrument (or group of instruments) in presenting, repeating and developing the main thematic material. These juxtapositions of tutti refrains and solo passages opened new possibilities for virtuoso display by solo instrumentalists as well bold shifts into other keys.
In RV 443, Vivaldi adopted the ritornello for the fast first and third movements, and made the slow intervening movement as important as the other two.
The first movement, in C major, opens energetically with a ritornello for the main body of instruments, leading to an incredible display of agility by the soloist. The movement continues with considerable rhythmic drive, including further demanding solo episodes.
The slow movement, largo, is a slow singing aria in E minor to which the soloist, in the style of the day, was expected to add embellishments. The music is in the swaying, lilting rhythm of the siciliana, a folk dance that originated in Sicily and became a favorite with Baroque composers.
The third movement, allegro molto, restores both the C major key and the ritornello format. In the contrasting episodes, the soloist indulges in trills, arpeggios and rapid triplets, interrupted by brief passages for the tutti to give the soloist a chance for breath.