We often think of Vivaldi as the quintessential Venetian composer, the Red Priest, master of violin and writing hundreds of concerti for the girls of La Pieta orphanage – a place so famed for its music that Englishmen on the Grand Tour would stop by to hear them.
But when it comes to his most famous work – The Four Seasons – he had moved to Mantua in 1717 to be Maestro di Cappella of the court of prince Philip of Hesse-Darmstadt, governor of Mantua. Funnily enough, it was from Mantua that Monteverdi had moved to Venice a little over a hundred years before. We are almost completely sure that the Four Seasons were composed between 1717 and 1720, and before Vivaldi’s move to Rome in 1722, and return to Venice in 1725.
The Four Seasons are the first four concerti of the twelve making up his Opus 8 Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione, published in Amsterdam in 1725.
Each of the Seasons is a three-movement violin concerto, with a sonnet inspiring the concerto as a form of word-painting.
The full texts with English translations can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Four_Seasons_(Vivaldi)#Sonnet_text
Ultimately, Vivaldi displays not just virtuosic violin technique, but depicts birdsong, the barking of a dog, bagpipes, hot dry weather, cuckcoo, lightning, thunder, the buzzing of flies and gnats, country dances, slumber, the hunt, the dying of a deer, feet stamping off snow and ice, teeth chattering in the cold, and the blast of the North wind.
The Listening Project Blog 