THIS month (June), Professor Peter Edwards returned to give Crediton and District u3a an excellent talk on Vivaldi, a Man for Four Seasons.

Antonio Vivaldi was born in 1678 in Venice to Giovanni Battista Vivaldi and Camilla Calicchio.

He was baptised at birth because there was a risk he may not have survived.

Given that he suffered from poor health throughout his life, this may have been because he was a sickly baby or perhaps it was due to an earthquake that happened on that day.

By age 15, he had entered training for the priesthood and at 25 he became ordained, although he never really practised as a priest.

For most of his active musical life he had an association with the Ospedale della Pietà, an orphanage in Venice, now the Metropole Hotel.

The orphanage provided musical training for young women, and they had a well renowned choir and orchestra. Besides sacred music and many, many concertos, Vivaldi wrote operas, and these were his downfall.

At first, they were successful, but as his style of music went out of fashion, he spent much of his money moving round the country promoting them.

Broke, he moved to Vienna to work under the patronage of Charles VI. However, Charles soon died and left Vivaldi without any source of income. Vivaldi died not long after in 1741 and was buried in a pauper’s grave in Vienna.

For the next 200 years, Vivaldi’s work was almost unknown. It’s not hard to see why.

Vivaldi wrote in the Baroque style.

Think anything with a harpsichord and you’re probably thinking Baroque.

Baroque music is characterised by extravagant trills and turns but follows very specific rules and can be very repetitive.

Listen to the summer movement of the "Four Seasons" and you can hear them all, long flowing passages, rhythmic precision, quiet repeats that sound like an echo, a harpsichord continuo and virtuoso solos. In fact, Stravinsky once said that Vivaldi did not write 500 concertos, he wrote one concerto 500 times.

Vivaldi only really became popular again in the mid-20th century.

In 1952, there were only two recordings on the "Four Seasons", by 2011, there were more than 1,000.

Today, he is more popular than ever.

Who has not stood in a lift or waited on a telephone line, and been subjected to a poor-quality recording of the "Four Seasons"?

And yet there’s much more to him than this one piece. Crediton and District u3a thanks Peter for widening their knowledge of this important composer and the period he lived in.

Richard Durant

Chair

Crediton and District u3a