Antonio Vivaldi wrote more than 500 concertos. Today, most people know four of them. But those four — commonly known as “The Four Seasons” — have become part of our cultural fabric. They may not even be his best concertos, but they’re ubiquitous. Even if you don’t know classical music, or think you know them, you’ve heard “The Four Seasons” — in movie soundtracks, on TV ads or playing on Muzak loops.
There’s a weird alchemical process involved in the crowning of cultural icons. Why have “The Four Seasons” prevailed when equally strong Vivaldi works are far less known? They’re good music, certainly. They sparkle. They’re filled with catchy tunes that propel the music forward and never overstay their welcome. They are also among the first examples of program music, illustrating the world around them: This is a cold winter wind, this is a spring cuckoo. For those uncertain about what they are supposed to be listening for in so-called classical music, concrete illustrations are a welcome point of orientation.
(Strathmore/STRATHMORE) - Phillip Glass' work ‘The American Four Seasons’ was performed as part of \"The Seasons Project,\" in November 2010 at the Strathmore.
Another part of the alchemy is the urge to replicate: The creative cells continue to divide. Composers and performers try to make the piece their own, not only by playing it, but by answering it, changing it, creating new works in its image. Nigel Kennedy, Mark O’Connor, Philip Glass, Max Richter: All have written responses to the “Four Seasons” in recent years in the form of new violin concertos. There are a lot of iconic classical pieces and a lot of attempts to modernize them (remember the disco-era “A Fifth of Beethoven?”), but I can’t think of another work that has inspired so many direct spinoffs.
Perhaps it’s because we love the music so much we play the meaning out of it, then back into it, like a word you repeat over and over until you’re briefly uncertain of its sense. “Many people fall out of love, because you hear it all the time,” says Richter. “It’s a paradoxical situation: It is a beautiful piece of music, but you end up sort of hating it.”
Richter’s piece sticks closest to its model of any of the recent Vivaldi responses. It follows Vivaldi’s outlines while diverging from the specifics. At some points, you can hear the original music clearly through a windowpane of slightly different sound — a veneer of electronics, a slight reshaping of the line. At other points, the whole piece takes off in such a different direction that Vivaldi is no more than a distant inspiration, while the music shimmers in splinters of Baroque-like ostinato.
“The thing about Vivaldi,” Richter says, “is that it’s constructed in a way that really lets you in. The movements are quite concise, but on a micro level it is modular music, made of these little atoms. You can pull them apart easily, sort of like a Lego kit.” It would be more challenging to re-imagine, say, a Romantic piece with long expressive lines, like the Mahler 10th.
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