The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Antonio Vivaldi · Le quattro stagioni, the first four concertos of Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione, Op. 8, RV 269, 315, 293 and 297 · four concertos scored here as one set, each with the sonnet printed with it · twelve movements, each concerto fast, slow, fast · for solo violin, strings and continuo · about forty minutes in performance
Mode
Solo concerto in ritornello form, bound by letter to a printed sonnet; descriptive music inside the concerto’s own design
Mythos
The round of the year and the labours of the months: the shepherd’s sleep, the vintage, the hunt, the fire
Phase
Four concertos, each fast, slow, fast; E major, G minor, F major, F minor, with no tonal plan across the four; seven of the twelve movements in minor keys
Presentation
Concert music; four concertos for solo violin, strings in four parts and continuo, printed in 1725 with four sonnets of fourteen lines
Register
Festive, pastoral and brilliant for the most part, with terror in Summer’s storm, cold grandeur at the opening of Winter and stillness in Autumn’s sleep
Scale
A countryman’s year inside the weather: nature, labour, the village, the body and time; about forty minutes
Governing Proposition
Four violin concertos are printed with four sonnets, and lines of each sonnet are keyed by letter to passages in the parts: birds, a goatherd and his dog, heat, a storm that flattens the grain, a drunkard, sleepers, a hunt, chattering teeth, a fire, a fall on the ice. The wager of the set is that the ritornello concerto can carry the year without giving up its form: that the returning tutti can be the season, and the solo episodes the events that cross it and pass.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
In 1725 Michel-Charles Le Cène published at Amsterdam a set of twelve concertos by Antonio Vivaldi, Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione, Op. 8, dedicated to Count Wenzel von Morzin. The first four are the seasons: La primavera in E major, L’estate in G minor, L’autunno in F major and L’inverno in F minor. Each is printed with a sonnet of fourteen lines, and lines of the sonnet are keyed by letter to passages in the parts. The desk scores the four as one set, with their sonnets; the other eight concertos of the print stand outside it.
Spring’s sonnet opens “Giunt’ è la Primavera”
“Spring has come”, and so does the music: a festive ritornello for the full strings, among the most widely heard pieces of European concert music. Then the first solo episode, birdsong for the solo violin with the orchestra’s two first violins, in trills and repeated notes. The ritornello returns. Streams follow, and a thunderstorm in tremolo and rushing scales, and the ritornello returns again; the birds come back after the storm. That is the law of the whole set, heard in its first minutes: the season is the returning tutti, and the events of the season are episodes that cross it and pass.
The Largo is in C sharp minor. The solo violin draws a long-breathed line, the goatherd asleep, over a rocking figure in the violins, and beneath both the viola is marked to play loud and rough throughout: the dog. The three layers are three registers of one scene, and the dog never stops. The finale is a pastoral dance in E major. It is the plainest of the three movements and extends itself by repetition more than by need; with Autumn’s outer movements, it is where the form is a container the programme fills, and another poem would fit it.
Movement II
Summer is the only concerto all in a minor key, and the only one where every movement is bent by its programme. The first, an Allegro non molto with faster sections, opens with languid, broken phrases under the heat: the will gives way before anything else does. In the solo episodes the cuckoo, the turtledove and the goldfinch are heard, and then the north wind breaks in. The form is fragmented because the scene is: the ritornello, which in Spring stood for the season’s constancy, here struggles to hold itself together.
The Adagio is the set’s plainest stroke of form. The solo line, troubled by flies and gnats, is interrupted more than once by thunder in the full strings, marked Presto. The sonnet gives the countryman’s fear; the music makes that fear audible as interruption, a slow movement that cannot finish a phrase without the storm cutting across it. Here the set discloses more than it depicts: rest and threat come from one nature, and the threat does not wait.
The Presto that follows is the storm itself, in G minor, in driving tremolo and falling scales, and in the sonnet it flattens the grain. It is real terror within its idiom, the sublime of force, and among the set’s heights. Summer is where the binding of poem and concerto is closest: three movements in one key, each turned by its scene, and the event, for once, larger than the season.
Movement III
Autumn begins with the harvest feast: a dance for the full strings in F major, and among the solo episodes the drunkard, in stumbling figuration for the violin that loses its footing and finds it again. It is genre painting, exact and good-humoured, and its figures stay genre figures. They do not acquire significance beyond their scene, and the movement, like Spring’s finale, is the composer’s usual concerto movement with a scene attached.
The Adagio molto is in D minor, and its strings are muted. The sleepers are held in slow chords whose harmony moves slowly, and for the length of the movement time seems to stop. It is the most beautiful music in the set and its stillest: no event, only the season at rest. It is also the furthest point from the Summer storm, and the same law governs both, for each is a scene, set into the plan where the slow movement belongs.
The finale is the hunt, in F major: horn-like calls in the strings, the quarry fleeing, and the quarry dying. The hunt is one of the labours of the months, and it closes the concerto of the vintage as the calendar picture would close it. The archetype behind the set is laid out here most plainly: the year as a row of labours, each in its place. It is laid out, not deepened; the death of the quarry is an event of the season, and the season goes on.
Movement IV
Winter opens with the most original sound in the set. Over a repeated pulse, the strings enter one by one, and each entry adds a dissonance to the chord, until the cold has been built up a part at a time. Then the solo violin brings the teeth chattering and the feet stamping. The ritornello, which in Spring was festive arrival, is here made of the cold itself. It is a cold grandeur, and the clearest case in the set of a form bent to know what its programme knows.
The Largo turns to E flat major. The solo violin sings a long line by the fire, and beneath it the strings play pizzicato: the rain outside. The comfort is real, and it is comfort only by contrast, the fire inside and the rain beyond the wall. That is the second thing the set discloses beyond its pictures: shelter is the edge of exposure. After Spring’s opening, it is the most widely heard music in the set.
The finale walks carefully on the ice, slips, falls, and then the winds war with each other. It ends the year in winter. Nothing in Winter answers Spring: the round of the year is a sequence of tableaux, and the set closes on the last of them rather than turning back toward the first. That is the measure of the archetype the set builds. The cycle orders the whole, and it is not a passage through death and return.
Movement V
The title of the print sets harmony against invention, and the four seasons are where the contest is plainest. The invention is in the colour: the viola’s dog, the muted sleepers, the pizzicato rain, the tremolo storms, the stacked dissonance of Winter, and a violin part of trills, bariolage, double stops and long cantabile. The harmony is plain beside Bach’s, the inner parts often thin or doubled, the counterpoint slight, and the sequences that carry the episodes are the composer’s routine. The making bears its weight in the colour and the violin. Against the Brandenburg Concertos (8.5), a Baroque concerto set of the same decade, the set wins The Archetypal Deep and loses every other axis but The Encompassed.
In Paris, Spring was played often at the Concert Spirituel from the 1720s to the middle of the century. Then the set was largely unheard for about a century and a half, until the twentieth-century Vivaldi revival brought it back. Recordings followed from the 1940s, and I Musici’s of 1955 helped make it one of the most recorded works of the Baroque. Marriner’s Academy recorded it on modern instruments; the period-instrument movement made it a test piece and remade its tempos, colours and violence. Max Richter’s Recomposed of 2012 is built on it. Its fame is real and is credited where it counts, in survival and in reach into performance.
Bruegel’s The Hunters in the Snow (8.7) comes from a painter’s cycle of the months and holds the same georgic year in one image built in depth; Virgil’s Georgics (9.1) is the source of the tradition. Beside them the set lays its year out as twelve scenes in four concertos, exact in particulars and held by one law. It remains what Le Cène printed in 1725: four sonnets keyed by letter to four concertos, a season that returns and an event that passes, and a year that ends in winter.
Act III · The Twelve
The large plan resists the subtractive test: four seasons make the year, and no concerto can go without breaking the cycle the title promises. Within each concerto the programme gives most episodes a reason to stand where they stand. The storm of Spring’s first movement must interrupt the birds so that they can return; the thunder of Summer’s Adagio must break the slow line, or the fear in its sonnet is not shown; Winter’s ice must come before the winds. The give is in the composer’s habitual means. The episodes run on sequence, a figure repeated a step higher or lower, and many could lose a link without loss; two dances extend themselves by repetition more than by need.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Disclosure through sound is credited in full, and something is disclosed beyond the picture: a human life lived inside weather, the body as the instrument on which the year plays. Heat breaks the will in Summer before the storm breaks the crop; in Winter the cold is felt in the teeth and feet, and the Largo finds comfort only as contrast, the fire inside and the rain beyond the wall. Summer’s Adagio makes the countryman’s fear audible as interruption. What holds the axis here is that most of the set is depiction: birds, dog, drunkard, hunter, ice. That pleasure and danger come from one nature, and that comfort is the edge of exposure, is present and is not pressed far.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Height comes several times, and mostly as the sublime of force. The Summer storm, a Presto in G minor of driving tremolo and falling scales, is real terror within its idiom. Winter’s opening, dissonances stacked entry by entry over a shivering pulse, is the most original sound in the set and a cold grandeur. Beauty comes in the slow movements: Spring’s Largo, Winter’s long line over pizzicato rain, and above all Autumn’s Adagio molto, where muted strings hold the sleepers in slow chords and time seems to stop. Frequency is the limit. Much of the set is charm and brilliance, the birds, the dances, the hunt, the ice, and its height is vivid more than transporting.
Score: 8.0 / 10
One archetype is built and bears weight: the round of the year, which orders the whole and is the reason the set is four concertos and not one. Behind it stand the labours of the months, the georgic world of the calendar picture: the shepherd’s sleep, the vintage, the hunt, the fire. The particulars are exact, the goatherd and his dog, the drunkard, the walker on ice, and the cycle is built into the print, sonnet by sonnet. It is held well below the gate because the archetype is laid out rather than deepened. The year is a row of tableaux, not a passage through death and return; it ends in winter’s comfort, and nothing in Winter answers Spring.
Score: 7.7 / 10
The inheritance is the Italian ritornello concerto, which Vivaldi had himself codified in his Op. 3 of 1711, and the long line of descriptive music: Jannequin’s birds and battles, Kuhnau’s Biblical Sonatas of 1700, Biber’s representative sonata, the storms of French opera. The departure is to put the programme inside the concerto’s own form, keyed line by line to a printed poem, so that the ritornello becomes the season and the solo episodes its events, and to do it across a cycle of four. The stake was bounded. It was a commercial print by a famous virtuoso in his established idiom; descriptive effects were a proven pleasure. The wager was on taste, not on the form’s survival.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Change the form and the work loses some of what it knows. The ritornello form is the instrument of its one thought: the season is the returning tutti, constant, and its events are episodes that break across it and are absorbed. In Spring’s first movement the birds, the stream and the storm come and go, and the ritornello says the season stays. The solo violin, one voice among many, fits the countryman inside the weather. The form bends where the programme asks: Summer’s first movement breaks into fragments, its Adagio is split by Presto thunder, Winter’s ritornello is built from stacked dissonance. Held lower because elsewhere the form is a container: Spring’s finale and Autumn’s outer movements would fit another poem.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Evidence, not promise, and of a particular kind. The set has been answered again and again in performance: modern-instrument readings by I Musici and by Marriner’s Academy, then period-instrument readings, Europa Galante under Biondi and Il Giardino Armonico among them, which remade its tempos, colours and violence, and Max Richter’s recomposition of 2012. The questions it leaves open are mostly performative: how literal the depictions should be, how hard the effects should be played, how much ornament the slow movements take. Scholarship has few open questions, among them who wrote the sonnets. The yield on return is real and narrow, and the surface is so well known that return often finds what it brought.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Published, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of Italian and European instrumental music of the 1720s. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the set showed that the solo concerto could carry an extended programme without giving up its form, and it fixed images, the storm, the birds, the ice, that later descriptive music returns to. The reorganisation of the concerto itself belongs more to Op. 3, which Bach transcribed, than to Op. 8. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Spring was played often at the Concert Spirituel in Paris from the 1720s to the middle of the century; in the twentieth century the set led the Vivaldi revival and the Baroque concerto back into concert life and onto record, and became a test piece of the period-instrument movement. That is reach into performance more than into composition.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Survival is weighed in form, then presence, then fabric. The form survives whole: the print of 1725, sonnets and lettered parts together, with nothing lost or doubtful in the music. Presence is the charge. After a life in Paris that lasted to the middle of the century, the set was largely unheard for about a century and a half, until the Vivaldi revival of the twentieth century brought it back. Since then its presence has been as wide as any concert work’s, and the tenth that wide presence earns is credited; the commercial ubiquity of Spring’s ritornello proves nothing more. The surface fixed to its moment is small: the depictions now read as the work’s own world.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The making is masterly where it bears weight. The writing for the violin is idiomatic and brilliant: trills, bariolage, rapid string-crossing, double stops, the long cantabile of the Largos. The orchestra is used as colour with an invention rare in 1725: the viola’s dog, the muted sleepers, the pizzicato rain, the tremolo storms, the stacked dissonances of Winter. The ritornellos are clear and memorable, and every effect is in its place. The costs are measured against the same anchors as every desk. The harmony is plain beside Bach’s; inner parts are often thin or doubled; the sequences that carry the episodes are routine, and the counterpoint is slight. The making bears weight in the colour and the violin, not throughout.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the festive E major ritornello of Spring and the F minor chattering of Winter, or the sleepers of Autumn and the Summer storm. One law governs them all: the season is the ritornello and the event is the episode, and the sonnet’s letter names each event in the parts. Every concerto keeps the plan of fast, slow, fast, and every slow movement is a scene of rest, sleep or shelter between scenes of action. The range is fairly wide: pastoral, labour, feast, hunt, fear, cold and comfort. The law holds in the plan and the programme more than in the material: the four share no theme and no tonal plan.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The orders held are several. The natural order is the whole surface: birds, streams, heat, storm, ice, wind. Labour is there in the shepherd, the harvest, the vintage and the hunt; the social order in the village dance and the feast; the body in heat, drunkenness, sleep and cold; time in the year itself. They are held in one structure, the cycle, and that is the set’s achievement on this axis. What holds it here, the lowest of the twelve, is that the orders are depicted more than integrated: each has its scene and passes. Consciousness is slight, a countryman’s fear and rest, and the sacred, the state, history and the family do not appear.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.0 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.1, then The Made at 8.5 and The Inner Law at 8.4. A text whole since the print of 1725, sonnets and lettered parts together, with a presence since the revival as wide as any concert work’s after a century and a half of silence; a violin part and an orchestral colour of rare invention; and one law, the season as ritornello and the event as episode, governing Spring’s festive opening and Winter’s cold.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.3: nature, labour, the village, the body and the year are held in one cycle but depicted more than integrated, and the sacred, the state, history and the family are absent. Next above it, The Unconcealment and The Bottomless Well at 7.6: most of the set depicts rather than discloses, and its yield on return is real but narrow, given to performers more than to listeners.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.9 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Made at 8.5, The Inner Law at 8.4, The Living Form at 8.1, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.1 clears the bar of 8.5, but Pressure on Tradition at 8.0 and The Swerve at 8.0 fall short by five tenths, The Archetypal Deep at 7.7 by eight tenths, and The Unconcealment at 7.6 by nine. The Universal Minimum is met, by a tenth: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.6, against 7.5, and The Unconcealment and The Bottomless Well clear it by a tenth each. The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.3. Four of the five summit conditions are met, and with the Epochal Gate unmet and an aggregate of 8.0 the work stands in Tier IV, at its foot.
Basis · the first four concertos of Vivaldi’s Op. 8, Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione, as published at Amsterdam by Michel-Charles Le Cène in 1725 and dedicated to Count Wenzel von Morzin, with the four sonnets printed with them, and their performance tradition on modern and period instruments, read from knowledge under the desk’s convention for concert music; no score, edition or recording was in hand. The four concertos, RV 269, 315, 293 and 297, are scored as one set, twelve movements in the order of the print, and no single concerto is scored apart. The sonnets are part of the unit, because the print binds them to the music by letter; they bear on what the set discloses and builds, and the music is not charged for their verse. Who wrote them is not known. The other eight concertos of Op. 8 stand outside the unit, and no performance or recording is the object. Italian is quoted only where the desk is certain of it: the opening words of Spring’s sonnet and the titles of the print and the four concertos; every English gloss is the desk’s own. Movements, keys and the share of minor keys were counted by script. Details that could not be verified are not given, among them the date of composition, the wording of the viola’s marking in Spring and of a line of Summer’s sonnet, a direction to the harpsichord in Autumn, the eighteenth-century arrangements of Spring, the date of the first complete recording, the dates of particular period-instrument recordings, and any claim that no set before it had bound a concerto to a text. The running time is a range across the recorded tradition, not a measurement, and the sound of the work as heard is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged.