Vivaldi

The biography of Vivaldi by François Hudry , illustrated by Philippe Peseux and accompanied by 2 compact discs.

It is a vecchio, which has a prodigious fury of composition. I heard him go to great lengths to compose a concerto, with all its parts, more quickly than a copyist could copy.

Forgetting can last a long time. For Antonio Vivaldi it lasted two hundred years. Men's memories are short, because today when his music is so popular, we have even forgotten that we had forgotten him for so long. Antonio Vivaldi's music is often thought to be purely joyful and superficial. We remember the joke saying that he had written the same concerto five hundred times. However, we must be wary of clichés and sweeping judgments. Vivaldi 's slow movements are often moments of reflection from which tender melancholy and true lyrical passion exude. Certain titles let us see a much gentler and more engaging character than the caricature left by his contemporaries.

Vivaldi 's life has come down to us with large gaps and many hypotheses still exist about him. On several occasions we lose track of him. We also don't know anything about his likes and dislikes. But his music, which has become so popular today, is inseparable from Venice where he spent most of his time and to which he was attached by such a strong bond that the city became like the mirror of the musician and vice versa. Virtuosity, joie de vivre, melancholy, these are the ingredients of this Venetian 18th century where the Serenissima begins to sink and live in the frozen memory of its sumptuous history.