The Four Seasons evinces Vivaldi’s importance to the development of the Baroque concerto.
The sonnets’ tripartite structures align with the three movements of each concerto, which in turn provide vivid musical depictions of the corresponding text. Vivaldi composed them to accompany a set of four sonnets-“La primavera,” “L’estate,” “L’autunno,” and “L’inverno”-whose authorship is uncertain but generally attributed to Vivaldi himself. The concertos that make up The Four Seasons ( Le quattro stagioni) appeared as the first four of twelve violin concertos published as Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione ( The Contest between Harmony and Invention), op. Such widespread popularity is a double-edged sword: The Four Seasons’s ubiquity in popular culture has too often presented as harmless background music a fiendishly inventive work by a composer of terrific originality. Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons makes a strong case as the Western canon’s most universally familiar music.
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