Venice, Italy, Aug 6, 2017 / 04:02 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- While Antonio Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” echoes in concert halls and elevators around the world, for some, his greatest masterpieces are not the scores resonating spring, summer, fall and winter, but rather his sacred music.
Although less known, Vivaldi’s sacred music compositions, according to a researcher and expert on the musician’s life, is probably his greatest contribution to music – featuring an altogether unprecedented combination of deep spirituality and the contemporary trends of the time.
And this profound personal spirituality was rooted in what is likely a little-known fact for many: Antonio Vivaldi was a Catholic priest.
“I’m going to give you the most bizarre idea. Think of the Pope, who represents priests, spiritual things, and then you’ve got Jimmy Hendrix, a superb guitarist. You put them together and you’ve got Vivaldi,” British researcher Micky White told CNA Aug. 1.
It’s a combination altogether “bizarre,” she said. “Vivaldi the priest, deeply spiritual, comes out in his music. Jimmy Hendrix Vivaldi you’ve heard in the Four Seasons; it’s the most bizarre piece of music.”
“It’s timely, a priest wrote it,” and it’s meshed with the modern style of the day – a combination of two things that are essentially “polls apart,” she said. “That’s what makes him stand out among anybody. Bach wasn’t a priest, Mozart wasn’t a priest, nor was Beethoven, but Vivaldi was.
In listening to Vivaldi, it’s obvious that he was a very faith-filled man, she said, “you hear it in his music, you listen to it.”
White, who left a thriving greeting card company in England and moved to Venice to pursue an increasing interest in researching Vivaldi’s life, has become an expert and point of reference on the musician.
Not only has she published a book, “Antonio Vivaldi: A Life in Documents,” as the fruit of her research, but she was a consultant for a new display on his life called “Viva Vivaldi: The Four Seasons Mystery.”
The exhibit, located just behind St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice, provides attendees with an indoor video-mapping show done with immersive HD images, surround sound and scent special effects such as scent and wind. It opened to the public May 13 at the Diocesan Museum, and will stay open during 2018.
One of the most famous Baroque composers, Antonio Lucio Vivaldi, affectionately known by many in his time as “the Red Priest” due to his auburn locks, was born in Venice in 1678.
His father, who was an instrumental figure in his life (pun intended), was a professional violinist, and taught his son how to play as a young child. The two then went on tour together throughout Venice, giving Vivaldi an extensive knowledge and even mastery of the violin from a young age.
In 1693, at the age of 15, he began studying for the priesthood. He was ordained in 1703 at the age of 25, and shortly after was appointed chaplain and Violin Master at a local orphanage called the Pio Ospedale della Pieta, or the Devout Hospital of Mercy.
The orphanage, called the “Pieta,” was founded in 1492 by a poor friar as a home for abandoned babies. Young children were typically raised by older girls already at the center, and while the boys were taught a specific trade and ousted at the age of 15, the girls were trained as musicians if they had the ability. If not, they were taught a different trade, such as reading or sewing.
The most talented of the girls stayed on and became members of the hospitals renown orchestra and choir. Vivaldi worked at the hospital from 1703-1715, when he was voted off the faculty. He was voted back in 1723, and remained until 1740, composing some of his most famous works during that time.
However, after just a year of being a priest, Vivaldi requested a dispensation form celebrating Mass due to his poor health. From birth he had been afflicted with a serious, unknown, health condition thought to be a form of asthma.
All that is known about the mysterious illness comes from the letter Vivaldi wrote asking for the dispensation, in which he referred to it as a “tightness of the chest.”
According to White, “it would have been very hard for Vivaldi to give up saying Mass. It would have been his own decision, a decision of nobody but himself, and he also gave up a good salary.”
She pointed to rumors alleging that he had been kicked out of the priesthood or even excommunicated, saying they “are so ignorant and so stupid,” because if one actually looks to the facts, the rumors are “not proven.”
She also addressed rumors that Vivaldi had abused the choir girls as the reason he was kicked off the Pieta faculty in 1715. These rumors, she said, “not only are they not true, they’re impossible.”
Not only would Vivaldi have never been welcomed back in 1723, but many of the girls who remained in the orchestra stayed until they were 70 or even 80 years old. The hospital was also overseen by several governors, so had there been abuse, Vivaldi would have been kicked out right away, “so that doesn’t add up,” White said.
People often make assumptions about the past or judge by their opinions, telling others that “’it must be like this’ or ‘so and so said that,’” White said, adding that when this happens “you go from bad to worse.”
But when she first started digging into her research on Vivaldi and putting the information into context, “then everything made sense,” she said, because “research is a matter of fact, it’s not a matter of opinion, and it’s not a matter of ideas, it’s fact.”
She insisted that his priesthood was likely an essential element of his music. Even after stepping down from his liturgical duties, Vivaldi never stopped being a priest, White said. “Once a priest always a priest.”
“He was ordained, he was a priest his whole life (and) his spirituality comes out in his music, all you have to do is listen and you’ll hear it.”
Although in poor health, Vivaldi made great strides in his musical career. He continued to write a variety of compositions, and received many commissions from all over Italy and Europe, for which he traveled frequently.
During one jaunt in 1722, Vivaldi moved to Rome, where he was invited to play for Pope Benedict XIII before moving back to Venice in 1725.
The various pieces he wrote throughout his career include several different types of concertos – from violin to orchestra – arias, sonatas, operas and sacred music.
But according to White, while the Four Seasons, written around 1721, and his many operas are what made Vivaldi rise to fame in his day, “sacred music is on another plane compared all the other compositions. It’s the empire of composition itself that comes from faith.”
Among the sacred scores written by Vivaldi are the Gloria, the Credo, the Stabat Mater, the Magnificat, Dixit Dominus and Laetatus sum, among others. The “Laetatus sum,” specifically, was written by Vivaldi at the age of 13 in 1691.
White said that while these are the known liturgical and sacred works, “there’s a lot, lot missing.”
Given his 38 year career at the hospital, there are likely many, many works of Vivaldi that have never been discovered, she said. For example, “I’m sure that he wrote full Masses, absolutely positive,” but they are likely all lost.
Despite the success he enjoyed during his career, Vivaldi died in poverty in Vienna July 28, 1741. He had moved to the Austrian country after meeting Emperor Charles VI, to whom he had dedicated his Opus 9 work, in 1728.
The emperor was so impressed with Vivaldi’s work that he gave the musician the title of Knight, a gold medal and an invitation to Vienna. However, the emperor died shortly after Vivaldi’s arrival several years later, and with no royal connection or steady income, Vivaldi became impoverished and died from an infection at the age of 63.
According to White, the greatest legacy that Vivaldi left can be summed up in one word: “music.”
“Music comes out of him, it doesn’t come out of his brain, it just pours out of him. It’s like a waterfall,” she said.
While his sacred and classical music might seem outdated in a society enthralled with artists such as Beyonce, Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber, White said Vivaldi is so versatile in his style that he can mesh with well with contemporary music as well as the older
“Vivaldi could do a rock concert quite easily, and Vivaldi can appeal to everyone,” she said. “Vivaldi, he’s alone, he’s absolutely unique. You talk about the Baroque style, and the romantic style…Vivaldi cuts that whole suede.”
With the “tremendous energy” present in his music, Vivaldi is truly one of a kind and is difficult to imitate, she said. “He doesn’t fit anywhere, and he fits everywhere.”
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Lord have mercy. Just more evidence of the “evangelization through marketing” mindset.
If these absurd proposals are being seriously considered, it is nothing short of disgusting. This church is a house of worship for a specific religion, that of the Catholic church. There is no good reason to use lights, projections of foreign languages and other touristy gimmicks to lure visitors and non-catholics. Nor to turn it into the equivalent of a shopping mall or commercial building lobby, with just as much emotional appeal. This is not THEIR church. Nor should they install modern atrocities of “art” such as faceless and twisted lumps of steel which are supposed to represent saints, such as those I have seen elsewhere. Most of these are non-inspirational pieces of junk that could be replicated by the average artistically unskilled 8 year old. Something you could never say about a Michaelangelo. I would have imagined that falling attendance numbers and low collection plate hauls would have been enough to notify the woke clergy that leftist “one size fits all” attitudes, and modern global “renovations” are not welcome in their church structures. It’s as if they intend to appeal to everyone in the whole world, EXCEPT those who will actually worship here. How sad that they are so convinced of their own self-righteousness that they can’t understand this. I think they had better replace Father Drouin immediately, if not sooner, before he effects any permanent damage with this nonsense. Disgusting.
Calm down LJ. If the French ministry of culture doesn’t like it, detracting from the historical significance of the structure itself, it won’t get approved. If there is a public outcry anger reopening, they will change it.
They claim they will incorporate biblical verses. There are many that invoke warnings against vanity. Maybe the first verse they might use were they to take seriously enough the Catholic principle of never presuming superiority to the peoples of the past, hopefully leading to an reconsideration to cancel their whole stupid project would be: “What is man, that thou are mindful of him?”
In the French Revolution of 1789 the bloodthirsty and atheistic mob installed a naked prostitute on the high altar of Notre Dame as the “Goddess of Reason.” In 2021 the same bloodthirsty and atheistic mob want to exceed this blasphemy by turning all of Notre Dame into a Pachamama temple devoted to the worship of its Marxist this-world materialism, ecologism, modernism, and cultural and sexual “diversity.” This is occurring under the direction of an Archbishop of Paris who has been accused of fornication and adultery with a married woman.
How about some facts to attest to your statement that the Archbishop has been accused of fornication and adultery. Who made these charges and what is the level of trust you place on this source?
The French magazine ‘LePoint’ made the accusation. NCR followed: https://www.ncronline.org/news/vatican/paris-archbishop-offers-resignation-pope-francis-following-reports-questionable
When the cathedral was torched in 2019 conscientious people knew what would transpire — not the restoration of a timeless work of ecclesiastical architecture but the sacrilegious desecration of a consecrated church. Then we were assured that would not happen — and now here it is. I never believed it would be otherwise. A temple to earth goddess Pachamama is announced just days after Macron visited the South American Jesuit pope in Rome.
Hopefully, if this cannot be adverted, the ruin will collapse.
“What they are proposing to do to Notre-Dame would never be done to Westminster Abbey or St. Peter’s in Rome.” Really? We’ve seen nothing yet. We are in the hands of demonic liars in both Church and society.
I agree entirely. I am.utterly convinced that the burnig down of Notre Dame was deliberate and is extremely significant, a warning in fact to Europe and the world. Such desolating times,and yet a wonderful opportunity to keep the faith and by that I mean in Jesus Christ.
In the modern era, the persistent glory of French cathedrals has always been that as part of the national architectural heritage, whose maintenance is the responsibility of the state, they are mostly immune to the ravages of post-conciliar “renovators.” For many years, I have told my students that the worst thing that could ever happen to a French cathedral would be to transfer its custody to the French Catholic Church, instead of keeping it in the hands of the French government. I explained that the Church authorities would immediately set about “updating” the interiors in the same manner that German, Austrian, Swiss and American churches have very often been destroyed. Now, we are about to witness the truth of this in the tragic “Disneyland renovation” of Notre Dame de Paris.
In most nations, the liturgy was turned into an amusement park first, and the Churches wrecked afterwards, to better reflect the nonsense taking place in the interior. Since “wreckovation” has mostly been impossible in France, the dignified interiors have worked to check the worst abuses of liturgy. However, once Notre Dame’s interior is destroyed, it will become just another site for pantheistic expression, with Pachamama soon making her demonic presence on the altar.
He said that side chapels would feature “portraits from the 16th and 18th century that will be in dialogue with modern art objects.”
Vacuous and yet revealing. No sensible person speaks this way.
Nu-Church—destroying Catholicism since 1964.
Charcuterie, fondue and a sampling of regional French wines also provided and served on the altar like a brassarie I assume.