Antonio Vivaldi

What failed

The governors of the Ospedale della Pietà decided annually whether to reconfirm each maestro in his post, and Vivaldi's ballots were never comfortable. Unlike Gasparini, who was confirmed unanimously up to 1716, he always drew between one and three "no" votes, and twice he fell short of the two-thirds majority he needed. On 24 February 1709 the first vote went seven for and six against, the second reversed it to six for and seven against, and he lost the post for two and a half years. On 29 March 1716 he lost it again, when only seven of twelve members voted in his favour. In November 1737 Cardinal Ruffo forbade him to come to Ferrara to mount opera; as Vivaldi set it out to his patron Bentivoglio on 16 November, the grounds were that he was a cleric who did not say Mass and was friends with the singer Girò. Charles de Brosses, who knew him towards the end of his life, found him less well regarded than he deserved, in a city where everything had to be fashionable, where his works had been heard for too long, and where last year's music no longer made any money. In 1740 his contract with the Pietà, where he had taught, conducted and composed on and off for almost forty years, was not renewed, and he sold off sizeable numbers of his manuscripts at paltry prices to finance the move to Vienna. Charles VI died shortly after he arrived, and the official royal mourning that followed banned opera performance for a year, closing the route he had probably gone to Vienna to take.

What happened next

He died in Vienna during the night of 27/28 July 1741, aged 63, in a house owned by the widow of a Viennese saddlemaker. His funeral was held at St Stephen's Cathedral on 28 July, the same day, and he was interred in the nearby hospital burial ground. What followed was not total obscurity: some of the works published in his lifetime, The Four Seasons among them, stayed in private collections, and Bach had transcribed six of his concertos for solo keyboard and a further three for organ. But as Miles Fish puts it, until the 1950s Vivaldi and his music were virtually unknown to the concert-going public. The manuscripts were the part that had gone. In the autumn of 1926 Alberto Gentili, professor of music history at Turin, opened crates sent for appraisal from a Salesian monastery at Monferrato and found hundreds of Vivaldi manuscripts in bound volumes, 185 years after his death. The missing portion was traced through the Durazzo family of Genoa, and the collection became complete again on 30 October 1930. A Vivaldi Festival Week was held in Siena from 16 to 21 September 1939, the first American recording of The Four Seasons was made in the final week of 1947 by the violinist Louis Kaufman, and Vivaldi is now one of the most performed composers in music history.

The point

The record is mostly of a working musician whose post kept going to a vote, in an institution that could not always afford him. The Pietà's minutes are a run of ballots and two of them went against him — though Heller is careful to say the vote was determined primarily by economic considerations as well as being an evaluation of each maestro's work, so losing the job twice is not the same as being judged unfit twice. A cardinal's prohibition stopped him going to Ferrara. The de Brosses letter is the flattest of the documents: not that Vivaldi had got worse, but that his works had been heard for too long and last year's music no longer made money. He kept composing through all of it and died poor anyway. The scale of what he had written was not established until crates were opened in Turin 185 years after his death.