Vivaldi: Voice of the Baroque - Softcover

Landon, H. C. Robbins

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226468429 ISBN 13: 9780226468426

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1996

Synopsis

Vivaldi boasted that he could compose a concerto faster than a scribe could copy one. Despite his prolificacy, The Four Seasons, and the majority of his already published work had fallen into obscurity by the time of his death in poverty in 1741. Most of his music-concertos, sonatas, operas, and sacral music-has been published only recently.

Very little has been written on Vivaldi for the nonspecialist, especially in English. Landon rediscovers the composer in this accessible and musically informed biography while presenting documentation of the musician's life discovered after the Baroque revival in the 1930s. This book includes illustrations of eighteenth-century Venice and several newly translated letters, thoroughly evoking the style of the time and revealing some of the more personal aspects of Vivaldi's life.

"Belongs on the shelf of every serious music student."—Kirkus

"Gives a good feel for Vivaldi's life and times . . . and describes particularly well how Vivaldi has been revived."—Booklist

"Robbins Landon is marvelously entertaining, extravagantly learned."—The Independent

About this title

From the Back Cover:

In Vivaldi: Voice of the Baroque, eminent musicologist H.C. Robbins Landon rediscovers the composer through an accessible and musically informed biography. Presenting documentation about Vivaldi discovered after the Baroque revival in the 1930s, Robbins Landon explores a fascinating life.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Short in length but long on scholarship, a ``life and works'' of the 18th-century Venetian master that belongs on the shelf of every serious music student. Robbins Landon, the distinguished musical archaeologist whose labors led to the rediscovery of much of Haydn's lost or neglected music, has also turned his attention recently to Mozart (1791, etc.). He now skips back a generation to focus on the composer whose name has become synonymous with the Italian baroque--not wholly new territory, since Robbins Landon also coauthored Five Centuries of Music in Venice (1991--not reviewed), but what prompted him to attempt a complete life of Vivaldi was the worldwide fascination with The Four Seasons. Prior to the 1950 Cetra recording of those four violin concerti, Vivaldi had been virtually forgotten for 200 years after having been buried in an unmarked pauper's grave in Vienna; today, he's one of the immortals. Yet Robbins Landon chooses not to speculate about the cause of the amazing ``Vivaldi renaissance.'' He's content to present a detailed, chronological, strictly factual biography, including Vivaldi's years as violin virtuoso and teacher of gifted orphan girls; his growing list of compositions; and his travels around Italy and, ultimately, Vienna--almost all undertaken in connection with his frustrated attempts to become established as an opera composer. Robbins Landon's method is to quote verbatim documents, letters, and dedicatory inscriptions in the original language (most are then translated): This exact but stern presentation may not appeal to the casual reader. The author inserts himself only long enough to recount his unsuccessful attempt to edit some of Vivaldi's many operas for modern presentation; he soon decided that the attempt was doomed. He notes that, unlike Haydn's operas and surely unlike Vivaldi's instrumental and religious music, Vivaldi's operas seem to offer little to contemporary listeners. But the author also has the good grace to hope that he'll be proved wrong. No fluff--just the facts and an invitation to explore the music. (Thirty illustrations) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0226468429
• ISBN 13: 9780226468426
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208