You may think you know Vivaldi. After all, who doesn’t recognize that chipper tra-la-la-la-LA that opens the "Spring" movement of The Seasons? Ah, Vivaldi: he of the umpty-million concertos, for violin and bassoon and flute and just about everything except the kitchen sink. Vivaldi the writer of countless dandy little pieces for one’s growing but as yet non-professional students, Vivaldi the spinner of endless wallpaper, bubbly perky stuff that goes on just long enough then stops, every bit of it ever so nice, so nice, so nice nice nice nice nice. Toodle-oodle-oo, boodle-oodle-oo, tatta tatta patta batta boooooooooooooom-chuck.
But in fact we don’t know Vivaldi worth a tinker’s damn. We don’t know jack about the guy or his music. He’s a mystery wrapped in an enigma inside a riddle. Works keep popping up hither and yon, and not just little stuff, either. Two years ago the world heard one of his operas for the first time since 1732. That wouldn’t be such a big deal if he were, say, Stradella or Bononcini or some other period lightweight unknown to all but music history wonks. But he’s Vivaldi, folks, familiar as an old shoe, Mr. The Seasons, Mr. Four Billion Concertos Served. But he’s actually Western music’s biggest iceberg, a teeny nubbin of known music up visible on the surface, the remaining 9/10ths floating down below out of sight.
Nor do we have all that much concrete info about the man himself. He was a priest, most definitely. He had red hair. He was a whale of a fine violinist. He played and taught at Venice’s Ospedale della Pietà, an orphanage for girls, for most of his life, although not continously. (He got fired in 1709 then reinstated in 1712, for example.) He frequented the Venetian opera houses, and considered himself an opera composer first and foremost. He wound up in Vienna, where he died more or less destitute.
Commentarial custom has it that Vivaldi wasn’t much of a priest. The notion is based on his refraining from saying Mass only about a year after his ordination, from his being censured for "conduct unbecoming a priest", and from a general sense of his being a careless spendthrift and/or randy rake. There’s a portrait of an unknown violinist that looks like a tarted-up version of a known image of Vivaldi, so it’s generally held to be a portrait of our boy. What a fluffpot he looks like in that painting, all gorgeous and expensively dressed and bewigged. But we don’t really know. He looks like a skinny bony little geek in Ghezzi’s pen-and-ink caricature. He may have stopped saying Mass because of his asthma, apparently pretty severe. The soprano Anna Girò may have been his mistress, but then again maybe not. Vivaldi does seem to have been a rather lavish spender—but, then again, he was an opera guy who needed to grease a lot of palms to get things done. And just because he liked wine, women, and song, it doesn’t naturally follow that he was insincere in his priestly calling. Anybody who thinks that priests give up their sex drive hasn’t been paying much attention to the news for the last decade or so. At least Vivaldi appears to have been an upstanding, garden-variety heterosexual instead of a child molester. The who, what, why, and wherefore of Vivadi’s life, his motivations, his loves and hates, his passions, his joys, his sadnesses: barely known at best, mostly inscrutable and probably unknowable. His music: mostly unperformed and unheard, even now.
Vivaldi as fluffpot; Vivaldi as skinny geek
Vivaldi’s 1712 Stabat Mater could impart a good solid shaking to any preconceptions one might have about the Red Priest of Venice. It’s an early work, written on a commission from the Santa Maria della Pace in Brescia, to be performed during 1712’s Holy Week festivities. Vivaldi received the commission while in Brescia in 1711; he was there playing a violin gig during his enforced hiatus from the Pietà (he had been fired in 1709, remember.) He probably wasn’t in Brescia for the performance, since the church ledgers record only the payment for the commission, and not for Vivaldi as a performer. So it’s a reasonable assumption that he wrote the work back home in Venice then popped the score into the mail.
I would guess that your average-joe music lover would not recognize the Stabat Mater as Vivaldi until the eighth movement Eja Mater. At that point a sharply dotted figure obsessively outlining a perfect fifth within an overriding descending-fifths sequence sounds like absolutely nobody except Vivaldi—vide the colder parts of The Seasons. Up to that point, however, one might be excused for wondering if this might be the work of a 17th century German composer, not quite as dour as, say, Samuel Scheidt, but maybe along the lines of Dietrich Buxtehude. There is nothing of the fluffy Venetian bubble-boy here. The mood is serene, static, the atmosphere gentle but almost claustrophobically introverted. The opening movement combines the text of the poem’s first two stanzas, and in so doing sets up a formal structure that neatly bypasses the usual problems of setting a strophic hymn like the Stabat Mater—that is, the dreary sameness that results as the stanzas go marching along, one after another, each with the same rhythm and rhyme scheme. Vivaldi’s structure is astounding in its simple inventiveness. He writes three movements worth of music, using them to set stanzas 1-4. Then he has the nerve to repeat that music for stanzas 5-7, but now setting one stanza per movement instead of the opening movement with its two stanzas. Then for movements 8–10 he provides all new music. There are those commentators who have interpreted Vivaldi’s wholesale repetition of movements 1–3 as evidence of haste, but I don’t buy it.
That’s because Vivaldi also limits his harmonic and tonal palette. The Stabat Mater is written in only two keys: F Minor and C Minor. Moments in major—even as subsidiary key centers within their respective overriding tonics—are few and far between. Only at the very end do we hear a short, welcome glow of F Major for the final "Amen." Otherwise, the work remains resolutely two-toned in its harmonic coloring, giving it the restrained bleak beauty of those elongated saints carved around the doors of Chartres.
Bleak? It’s almost stark. It has no fast movements to speak of, although O quam tristis (and its corresponding Pro peccatis) moves a bit faster than the rest. This is a Vivaldi of monochromatic, monotonal reserve, almost Stravinskian in his relentless economy of means, allowing neither a wasted note nor unnecessary gesture. Vivaldi wrote the Stabat Mater specifically for male alto, probably the castrato Sandro Filippi, on salary at the della Pace. Beside the countertenor, it requires a few violins, a cello, a bass, and a discreet organ continuo. That’s it. If you have a viola handy it can be used in the Eja Mater, but Vivaldi specified that the part could be played by violin if no viola was handy. (The della Pace didn’t have one in 1711 when Vivaldi received the commission, so he was covering his bases.)
The Stabat Mater stands with the D Major Gloria RV 589 among Vivaldi’s most frequently performed and recorded sacred vocal works—of which, by the way, there are surprisingly many for a composer who never actually held down a church job. For this listener, two recordings stand out as being truly exceptional: the first featuring David Daniels accompanied by Fabio Biondi conducting Europa Galante, recorded in 2002 and available on Virgin Veritas. The other offers the equally compelling Daniel Taylor with the Theatre of Early Music, a performance with an impressively cool emotional temperature, on BIS. Although I love Robin Blaze’s beautiful tone and impeccable musicianship in his 1998 outing with Robert King and the King’s Consort (available on Hyperion’s complete Vivaldi sacred music set), I can’t keep from feeling that Blaze is just a bit too…well….nice in his approach. In my opinion it’s a guy’s piece even if the text concerns the grieving of a mother for her son, so recordings with a female soloist don’t do much for me. Overall I give the nod to David Daniels, who always sounds indisputably male no matter how high his register or how ravishingly refined his tones.
But I recommend any recording to which you might have access. Get to know the Vivaldi Stabat Mater. Really get to know it. Listen, listen, listen, attentively and repetitively. There are few sacred works in the repertory that explore grief so intimately while avoiding the slightest hint of sentimentality. So go for it. You have nothing to lose except, perhaps, an incomplete and misleading notion of Antonio Lucio Vivaldi, my A-Number-One candidate for the least understood composer of the Baroque era.