Summary: <br> Probable portrait of Antonio Vivaldi, ca. 1723<br> <br> <br> <br> On March 4, 1678 – 341 years ago today – the Italian composer, violinist, priest and rapscallion Antonio Vivaldi was born in Venice. Yes, I know we are all “one-of-a-kind” and that that phrase is way overworked, but truly, Antonio Lucio Vivaldi was a genre unto himself!<br> <br> <br> <br> Vivaldi came to be known il prieto rosso (“The Red Priest”) for two excellent reasons: he had bright red hair and was trained as a Catholic priest. He might just as easily – and accurately – have been called “The Red Violinist” or Il Rosso Compositore: “The Red Composer”.<br> <br> <br> <br> All together, Vivaldi composed 49 “serious operas” in the ornate Venetian style that was all the international rage at the time. For better or for worse, the great bulk of these operas have fallen into obscurity; their artificial story lines and formulaic construction don’t resonate well with modern audiences. However, Verdi’s concerti do indeed resonate, and there are a lot of them: over five hundred in number. (49 operas. 500-plus concerti. Add to that hundreds upon hundreds of sacred works. These are crazy numbers, and despite the formulaic construction of much of this music, we must stand in awe of Vivaldi’s amazing fecundity. Let’s hear it for living in an age without electronic distractions!) <br> <br> <br> <br> Just under half of Vivaldi’s concerti – roughly 230 of them – are for solo violin and orchestra. Modern scholarship has confirmed that virtually all of them were written for performance at a Venetian convent-slash-orphanage-slash-conservatory of music called the Pio Ospedale della Pietà (the “Devout Hospital of Mercy”), or “Pietà” for short. <br> <br> <br> <br> Venice in 1650<br> <br> <br> <br> Ah, Venice!<br> <br> <br> <br> The city of Venice was not just – once upon a time – the capital of a maritime empire and one of the wealthiest and most populous cities in Europe. It was (and remains) a work of art; an urban theme park that to this day induces visitors to shake their heads in disbelief. The city is built in the middle of a shallow lagoon on 118 tiny islands. It is crisscrossed by 177canals and connected by 409 bridges. For hundreds of years Venice has been a necessary destination, an essential stop on everyone’s “grand tour”. <br> <br> <br> <br> At the time of Vivaldi’s birth – in 1678 – Venice was the most decadent, licentious, anything-goes city in the Western world. With its many opera houses and theaters; its Carnival season; its world-famous casinos and prostitutes, Venice was the Las Vegas of the seventeenth century: hey baby, what happened in Venice stayed in Venice!<br> <br> <br> <br> In a seaport city and destination like Venice, filled with sailors and tourists and prostitutes, what often “happened in Venice” was unwanted children. Thus, the presence in Venice of four orphanages for girls: the Pietà, the Incurabili, the Mendicanti, and the Ospedaletto. These facilities dated back to the crusades, when they were opened as hostels (in Italian, ospidali) for pilgrims. By Vivaldi’s time they had become orphanages for foundling girls: infant girls abandoned by their mothers and left in a “baby hatch” (or what was called a “foundling wheel”) in the wall of an orphanage. <br> <br> <br> <br> The girls in these orphanages were educated and taught trades, and no trade was more important in Venice than music. By the seventeenth century, these orphanages operated the city’s most important conservatories of music, where the standards were so high that the nobility enrolled their own daughters in them for study. By Vivaldi’s time, the orphanages had become a center of Venetian musical activity. <br> <br> <br> <br> Writing in 1739, the travel writer Charles de Brosses – the Rick Steves of his day – described the concert scene in Venice t...
