Vivaldi, Handel & the Concerto
From Venice's canals to London's theatres — Vivaldi perfects the concerto and paints nature in sound; Handel conquers English musical life and elevates the oratorio into a national institution.
3.1 Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741)
Antonio Vivaldi was born in Venice on 4 March 1678, during an earthquake — his mother, fearing he would not survive, had him baptised immediately. He was ordained as a priest in 1703 but almost immediately obtained a dispensation from saying Mass, citing a chest condition (probably asthma). He was known as “il prete rosso” — the Red Priest — for his vivid red hair.
His career centred on the Ospedale della Pietà, one of four Venetian institutions that served as orphanages and conservatories for illegitimate, orphaned, or disabled girls. The Pietà's musical ensemble was the finest in Venice — the girls performed behind grilles to preserve their anonymity, and the concerts drew visitors from across Europe. Vivaldi served there intermittently from 1703 to 1740, composing an astonishing 500 concertos for its orchestra.
He also composed some forty operas, many sacred works, and chamber music. His output was vast but uneven; he was known to compose a concerto faster than a copyist could write it out. His last years were spent in Vienna, attempting to interest Emperor Charles VI in his music. The Emperor died in 1740; Vivaldi died in Vienna the following year in poverty, buried in a pauper's grave.
Like Bach, Vivaldi was largely forgotten after his death. His rediscovery came in the 20th century, when the musicologist Alberto Gentili discovered 14 volumes of Vivaldi manuscripts in a Piedmontese library in the 1920s. Today he is among the most performed Baroque composers.
3.2 The Four Seasons & Programme Music
Le quattro stagioni (The Four Seasons), published in Amsterdam in 1725 as the first four of twelve concertos in the collection Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione (The Contest of Harmony and Invention), is the most famous piece of Baroque music and one of the most recognisable works in all classical music. Each of the four violin concertos depicts a season, accompanied by a sonnet (probably written by Vivaldi himself) that the music illustrates bar by bar.
Spring opens with a riotous bird chorus; the slow movement depicts a sleeping goat-herd watched by his faithful dog; the finale is a rustic dance. Summer reaches its crisis in a thunderstorm of extraordinary violence. Autumn opens with a harvest festival and ends with a hunt. Winter's slow movement is one of the most tenderly beautiful pages in all music: a warm fire crackling (pizzicato) while rain falls outside (tremolo strings).
The Four Seasons was unusual in its time for being explicit programme music — instrumental music that tells a specific story or paints a specific scene. It anticipates by over a century the great Romantic tone poems of Berlioz, Liszt, and Richard Strauss. Its direct, vivid pictorialism made it immediately popular across Europe, and it has never left the repertoire.
3.3 The Baroque Concerto: Form and Technique
Vivaldi was the decisive architect of the concerto as we know it. Before him, the form was still fluid — the concerto grosso alternated a small group of soloists (the concertino) with the full orchestra (the ripieno), but without fixed structure. Vivaldi systematised this into a three-movement plan:
Fast. The soloist and orchestra exchange material, the soloist ornamenting and elaborating while the orchestra returns repeatedly to a refrain (the ritornello).
Slow. Lyrical and song-like, often the emotional heart of the concerto. The orchestra recedes to continuo support.
Fast. Bright, energetic finale. Often dance-like in character. The soloist gets a final opportunity for brilliant display.
The ritornello principle — where a recurring orchestral refrain frames and punctuates the soloist's episodes — is Vivaldi's most important structural invention. Bach studied Vivaldi's concertos intensively and transcribed sixteen of them for keyboard. The ritornello became the basis of Bach's concerto writing and even influenced the aria structures of his cantatas.
Baroque ornamentation was expected and improvised: trills, mordents, turns, appoggiaturas, and elaborate cadenzas (unaccompanied passages of brilliant solo display inserted before the final cadence). A soloist who played the written notes without embellishment would have seemed timid and unimaginative to Baroque audiences.
3.4 George Frideric Handel (1685–1759)
George Frideric Handel was born in Halle, Saxony, on 23 February 1685 — the same year as Bach, though the two men never met. Unlike Bach, who spent his entire life within a small radius of central Germany, Handel was the great cosmopolitan of Baroque music: born German, trained in Italy, established in London, writing Italian operas for English audiences. He became a British subject in 1727.
Handel arrived in London in 1710 and conquered it almost immediately. His Italian opera Rinaldo (1711), composed in a fortnight, was a sensation. For the next thirty years he dominated London's operatic life, composing some forty Italian operas for the King's Theatre in the Haymarket. The operas are full of magnificent music — long da capo arias of extraordinary expressiveness, brilliant virtuoso writing for castrato soloists — but they were also expensive, unpredictable successes, dependent on star singers and aristocratic patronage.
By the late 1730s the London taste for Italian opera had faded, and Handel faced financial ruin. He responded by pivoting to the English oratorio — a decision that secured his immortality.
3.5 Messiah (1741) & the English Oratorio
The oratorio — a large-scale dramatic work for soloists, chorus, and orchestra, setting a sacred text and performed without staging or costumes — had existed since the early Baroque. But Handel transformed it into something uniquely English: a grand civic entertainment that combined religious solemnity with theatrical excitement, and that required no opera house, no stage machinery, and no Catholic liturgy to justify it. The genre suited Protestant England perfectly.
Messiah was composed in an astonishing twenty-four days in August and September 1741. The libretto, compiled by Charles Jennens from scripture, covers the life, death, and resurrection of Christ in three parts. Handel conducted the premiere in Dublin in April 1742. The London premiere the following year was less successful, but within decades Messiah had become the most beloved choral work in the English-speaking world, performed at amateur choral societies across Britain and America.
The tradition of standing during the Hallelujah Chorus — supposedly begun when King George II rose to his feet — may be apocryphal, but it persists. What is certain is that the chorus, with its overlapping entries of “Hallelujah,” its thundering pedal points, and its blazing final chords, remains one of the most electrifying moments in all music.
Handel's other great oratorios include Saul (1739), Israel in Egypt(1739), Samson (1743), Belshazzar (1745), and Judas Maccabaeus(1747). The last, celebrating military victory, made Handel a national hero.
3.6 Water Music & Royal Fireworks Music
Handel also composed some of the most celebrated occasional music of the age. The Water Music (1717) — three suites for an orchestra of some fifty players performed on barges accompanying King George I's pleasure trip up the Thames — is festive, brilliant music perfectly calibrated to impress a king who was not yet confident of his English subjects' affection.
The Music for the Royal Fireworks (1749) was commissioned to celebrate the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle. The outdoor premiere, for an orchestra of over 100, ended in disaster when the fireworks display caught fire, but the music itself — heroic, brilliant, magnificently scored — became one of the most popular of all Baroque orchestral works. Handel later rearranged it for the smaller forces available in concert halls.