Essay Example on Vivaldi's Four Seasons: A Musical Icon in the 21st Century

Classical music is not the kind of music to easily achieve widespread popularity within the modern culture, but Vivaldi's The Four Seasons can still be considered a musical 'icon' even at the beginning of the XXI century, more than three hundred years after it was created by the famous Italian composer and violinist. Andrew Mellor writes, "it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, a set of four violin concertos, are the world's most popular and recognised pieces of Baroque music" (Mellor, 2019). The secret of Vivaldi's success lies within not only his ability to produce highly recognizable melodies, but also his talent to arouse the listener's emotions by the way of painting with music: creating 'musical landscapes' filled with living beings, humans and animals, and natural phenomena. His piece "Winter" manages to paint a 'musical picture' of a season that can bring both pleasure and acute discomfort, to show how splendidly versatile it is and to make the listener actively participate in the experience of merging together music, words and visual images to create a powerful immersive effect.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

The Four Seasons is the most famous piece written by Antonio Vivaldi which triggered an active debate at the beginning of the XVIII century when it was created and first performed. It may be hard to imagine today, but the iconic concertos were extremely innovative and profoundly impressed Vivaldi's contemporaries. Vivaldi wrote music that not only pleased the ear but also had a narrative aspect: it reflected the composer's vision of spring, summer, autumn, and winter, portrayed their 'character' and 'moods,' told their stories. While listening to the four violin concertos one can hear dogs barking, fire crackling, wind blowing, thunderstorm raging, etc. Vivaldi even accompanied the concertos with four sonnets that reflected their subject matter and structure, making The Four Seasons one of the earliest and most influential examples of program music (Mellor, 2019). Pondering on the problem of Vivaldi's attempt to make the critics and the audience take program music seriously, Andrew Meller especially praises the meticulous approach to details that characterizes the composer's structural thinking: "each movement ... would establish a certain mood, against which narrative events could then play out. When it came to the detail of those occurrences ... Vivaldi delivered elegance and originality where other composers had barely moved beyond crude animal-noise cliches" (Meller, 2019). Seen from such an angle, Vivaldi's attempt can be considered a successful experiment, as he managed to create a musical masterpiece that excites both the ears and the imagination.

The artistic form of this musical piece plays a very important role. The concerto form used by Vivaldi presupposes that a soloist is playing opposite an ensemble, which allows the composer to highlight certain moods and to subtly bring in the shades and undertones. For example, in the second movement the soloist renders the pleasures of staying in on a cold, wintry day, while the ensemble helps create the contrasting picture of the frozen landscape behind the window pane. The violin is an ideal instrument to imitate the howling winter wind that is trying to knock the frozen passers-by off their feet, but it also willingly and ingeniously conjures up the sensation of warmth and pleasure when the fire is licking the logs in the fireplace. It is quite possible, that Vivaldi drew the inspiration for The Four Seasons not only from the immediate contact with nature, but also from his own fascination with the violin and its amazing ability to paint musical portraits of peace and fury, bliss and misery.

Listening to Vivaldi's "Winter" for the first time without any prior knowledge of its background is dramatically different from the consequent 'informed' listening sessions. When hearing "Winter" for the first time, the listener is profoundly overwhelmed by the grandeur of the music, the dramatic mood changes between the movements and the intense delight obtained when immersing oneself into the streaming, flowing richness of the violin. When the listener knows the title of the piece, the imagination starts its journey into the realm of winter. Here the sonnet that Vivaldi possibly wrote is of great help: it brings the details of Vivaldi's imaginative design into sharp relief. In the first movement, we can hear a human being, eager to get home, hurrying along an icy path, trembling and stamping feet. From time to time the wind starts howling and the listener cannot but empathize with the humans making their way through the slashing violins. In the second movement, the listeners find themselves sitting comfortably by the fireplace, enjoying the warmth. The sensation is heightened by the realization that winter outside is as cold and merciless as ever. In the final movement, the careful, timid steps are balanced by the hasty gate and involuntary dance of those who have slipped on the icy path. Yet, though Vivaldi illustrated his concertos with the help of the sonnets, this interpretation is not finite. Every listener is free to think of their own associations and visual images.

What especially impressed me is that the composer is not trying to hide the dark sides of winter, the cold, the loneliness, the sense of danger, the fear, the stillness, and the fury. As F. David Martin and Lee A. Jacobus put it, "the subject matter of art ... is not limited to the beautiful and the pleasant, the bright sides of life. Art may also include and help us understand the dark sides - the ugly, the painful, and the tragic" (Martin, Jacobus, 2015, p. 3). According to the authors, art helps us "come to grips with those dark sides of life" (Martin, Jacobus, 2015, p. 3). Vivaldi helps the listeners come to grips with the inevitability of change.

"Winter" is the last piece in The Four Seasons and it combines music, words and visual images evoked by the sounds and the sonnets to speak to the listener about profound philosophical issues. It teaches us that beauty is fleeting and we need to learn to appreciate it. But also this musical masterpiece proves that there is beauty in the most unlikely places and helps us learn to notice it.

References

Martin, F. D., & Jacobus, L. A. (2015). The humanities through the arts. New York: McGraw-Hill Education.

Mellor, A. (2019, March 7). 'The Four Seasons': A Guide To Vivaldi's Radical Violin Concertos. Retrieved February 24, 2020, from https://www.udiscovermusic.com/classical-features/vivaldi-four-seasons/

Vivaldi Winter - Mari Samuelsen. (2013). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KxzuY0fJ-s&feature=youtu.be