Antonio Vivaldi

Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741) was the great virtuoso violinist-composer of the Venetian Baroque, and one of the most influential composers of his age. Ordained a priest (his red hair earned him the nickname ‘il Prete Rosso,’ the Red Priest), he spent much of his career at the Ospedale della Pietà, a Venetian home for foundling girls, whose famous all-female orchestra and choir he supplied with a torrent of music. He wrote some five hundred concertos (most famously The Four Seasons), which did much to establish the three-movement concerto form and whose driving rhythms and brilliant solo writing influenced composers across Europe, Bach among them. Alongside the concertos he produced operas and a substantial body of sacred music. Hugely celebrated in his lifetime, he died in poverty and obscurity in Vienna, and was largely forgotten until the twentieth-century Baroque revival restored him to his place as one of the era’s titans.