Antonio Vivaldi

Antonio Vivaldi, born in Venice in March 1678, is often counted among the greatest Baroque composers, but he was also a virtuoso violinist and an impresario. Contemporaries across Europe admired him and produced many imitators. He pioneered advances in orchestration, violin technique and programmatic music, and above all he shaped the emerging concerto, especially the solo concerto, into an idiom that others widely accepted and followed.

His best-known work is The Four Seasons, a series of violin concertos. Many pieces were written for the all-female ensemble at the Ospedale della Pietà, a Venetian orphanage where he taught from 1703 and worked for around thirty years. Ordained a priest at 25, he was nicknamed il Prete Rosso, and he staged costly operas in Venice, Mantua and Vienna. He moved to Vienna after meeting Emperor Charles VI, but the Emperor died soon after and Vivaldi died in poverty less than a year later. His reputation declined for nearly two centuries before reviving in the early twentieth century, and several lost works have since been rediscovered, the latest in 2015.