Content area
Full text
Articles
I thank Wendy Heller, Alessandro Giammei and the journal's anonymous reviewers for their assistance. An early version of this article was presented at the 2016 Meeting of the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music, held at the University of Texas at Austin, 25-28 February 2016.
How might a composer in the early eighteenth century use music to convey the excitement of the hunt, the oppression of summer heat, the terror of a thunderstorm or the joys of the harvest? The use of any expressive medium to represent the cycle of the seasons was an audacious artistic venture. While people in seasonal climates are affected by changing conditions throughout the year, there are many aspects of the day-to-day experience of each season that are repetitive or unremarkable. To command an audience's attention, artists needed to be able to dramatize, allegorize or even defamiliarize the mundane.
This is part of the challenge undertaken in Antonio Vivaldi's cycle of concertos known as Le quattro stagioni (the title by which Vivaldi referred to them in the dedication of his Op. 8), works that were highly popular in his own day and are among the most ubiquitous examples of baroque music for many modern listeners. None the less, familiarity with these works has dulled our awareness of how little we actually know about them and the extent to which this cycle differs substantially from early modern approaches to the subject of the seasons.1Indeed, Vivaldi drew upon motifs from traditional seasonal depictions in literature, poetry, the visual and decorative arts and (to a lesser extent) music, but he introduced a level of visceral extremes that, as we shall see, exemplifies the emerging eighteenth-century aesthetics of nature and the sublime. The means through which he accomplished this are no less remarkable. Whereas visual artists created vivid imagery by using, for example, contrasting textiles in a tapestry or colours of paint on a canvas, Vivaldi heightened the affective experience of his four concertos through orchestration - that is, the effects created through the artful manipulation and combination of specific sonorities and textures. The orchestration of The Four Seasons, in fact, provides the key to appreciating the concertos' originality because it allows Vivaldi to direct his listeners' attention to specific musical events...