THE FOUR SEASONS
The fist time I hear the Four Seasons was 40 years ago in a book-store in the city of Celaya, in Guanajuato, Mexico. It seems like a million years had passed since then. The music was like nothing I've ever heard before: Catchy, powerful, celebratory. For obvious reasons, I did not hear the entire work that time. But what little I heard, stuck in my head. The title itself made me think of cute flowers, bright sunshine, gentle wind, and white snow. All the elements compacted in one master piece. Well, not so fast.
I learned that Vivaldi's Seasons were published along sonnets to accompany the music. Each sonnet describes the scenes and events that the music portrays. The Four Seasons are much more than "Spring is pretty, Summer is hot, Autumn is harvest, Winter is cold". The sonnets along with the music, tells us surprising details. Nature is beautiful, certainly, but it's also unpredictable, dangerous and completely indifferent to us.
Four violin concertos, each with three movements. What happens inside is where Vivaldi compressed something much more than the usual things we associated with them. Without knowing, I was actually hearing thunder and lighting, a dog barking, a shepherd in distress, exhaustion, fear, hail storm destroying crops, drunken people at the tavern, an animal hunted, wounded and eventually killed, freezing temperatures, shelter by fire, ice cracking while slipping on it, violent winds.
Vivaldi lived during the later part of what is known as the Little Ice Age, a period associated with harsh winters, unpredictable weather and crop failures. Much the same like in 2021 in some parts of the planet, except for people in the 18th Century, whose survival depended directly on the weather, a storm wasn't just something interesting to watch through a window while sipping a warm cup of coffee. It could determine whether a family ate or went hungry.
Vivaldi, despite the success of The Four Seasons, eventually fell out of fashion and was largely forgotten. He died in Vienna in 1741, in poverty, and his music disappeared from public attention for generations. The manuscripts of The Four Seasons themselves were eventually buried in obscurity and were not rediscovered until much later.
The blooming of a flower with Spring bathing on sunshine, growing up with Summer moving rhythmically, getting older with Autumn until it freezes in time, dying with Winter. Only to start all over again, such is the cycle of life. It's a beautiful idea. If only life were actually that fucking simple.