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October 31, 2005
Adagio molto
Fà ch' ogn' uno tralasci e balli e canti
L' aria che temperata dà piacere,
E la Staggion ch' invita tanti e tanti
D' un dolcissimo Sonno al bel godere.
from The Four Seasons by Antonio Vivaldi
I woke last Saturday to the unmistakable strings of a Vivaldi concerto -- one of his Dresden Concertos, I later learned. The slipping of time from the season of daylight to one where night outpaces day this past week made me pause and think about Vivaldi, whose Four Seasons is surely among the most played (perhaps overplayed) piece of baroque music on classical radio today.
Although I am no expert on Antonio Vivaldi, nor on the music of his era, his oeuvre has always had a certain resonance for me. As I lay in bed and the timbre of the final notes gave way to a moment of silence, I reflected on my last connection with Vivaldi when Jen and I visited Venice a few years ago.
Among the uneven cobbles of the piazza before the San Giovanni in Bragora (where Vivaldi was baptized), we sat before a stately building, which stood out from the many other facades of peeling paint the colors of sunset with its detailed scrollwork and window boxes overflowing with red flowers, still brilliant in the evening light. Through a row of open high windows, we could only see the top of an ornate chandelier, but we could hear the strings of Vivaldi easing their way through the open window and into the Italian evening air.
I was thankful for such a serendipitous radio broadcast to transport me across the seas and across the seasons in the still dark of a mid-autumn dawn.
Vivaldi's Le Quattro Staggioni, The Four Seasons, is a series of four concertos, each of which echoes one of four sonnets, most likely also written by Vivaldi, which portray appropriately seasonal tableaus. Each concerto is divided into three movements, shifting tempo from -- in the case of Autumn -- the upbeat dance of a harvest celebration to a reflective slumber after the last of the wine is gone and the farmers take a deserved respite to, finally, the drama of hunters chasing down their quarry.
This morning of "falling back" into slumber is eerily reminiscent of the adagio molto of Autumn's second movement, though I wait, too, for the sounding of the horn and the harried march to winter in the coming month.
Vivaldi's violin concerti, with their playful resonance between orchestra and soloist (or select group of strings), draw on the echoing repetition of the ritornello, resounding like the rhythmic movement of branches deep within a field maple as they match the push and pull of the tree's trunk against the cold, matted ground below. The clear, discrete melodies of the single voice both echo and guide the sound of the full orchestra, each learning from the other and drawing on the other to create the final harmony of the concerto.
As the memories of Venice fade from my mind and I think about today, the coming darker months, and my son's fast-approaching first birthday, I cannot help but see in my relationship with him the sounds of a concerto as he learns to tune his own instruments and I wait to follow whatever melody he brings to me to share.
Passar al foco i di quieti e contenti
Mentre la pioggia fuor bagna ben cento
from The Four Seasons by Antonio Vivaldi
Posted by pavel at 7:46 AM | Comments (1)