I’ve been enjoying a recorded lecture series entitled The 30 Greatest Orchestral Works. It’s from The Great Courses (www.thegreatcourses.com) featuring
Dr. Robert Greenberg as lecturer. One of
the things I like most about the course is how Dr. Greenberg places the
classics in historical context. He
paints vivid pictures of the composers, the times and places in which they
lived and worked, and the personal dimensions of their lives that colored their
masterworks.
It may seem inappropriate for one person to define the 30
greatest orchestral works. It may have
been more correct to simply call the series “30 Classical Masterworks” because
in Lecture 32 “The Ones That Got Away” he mentions some of the many works that
rightly deserved to have been included in the series but that due to a variety
of reasons, including overzealous copyright protections that prohibited the
examination of certain pieces, we would have to be content with the 30 he
selected. He points out several times
that he would not say that one symphony is necessarily “better” than another,
but in this collection he has avoided including any works that had already been
discussed in his other lectures so the list of eligible pieces was already
shortened. I for one am content to let Dr.
Greenberg expand my appreciation of a collection that is worthy of
representing western classical music. The
pieces range from the Baroque through the Classical and Romantic periods up to Modernism
with Dmitri Shostakovich in 1953 – a span of over 200 years.
While I am unable to convey the musical dimensions of my
experience for lack of audio examples and formal training in music theory, perhaps
I can share something that will color your next listening.
Take, for instance, Antonio Vivaldi. Most famous for The Four Seasons, Professor Greenberg characterizes Vivaldi’s more
than 500 concerti as “the capstone of the Italian baroque instrumental style,
and…one of the greatest bodies of work ever composed by anybody.” As such, that would make his The Four Seasons, the apex of that
capstone. Published in 1725, it remains
one of the earliest orchestral works that still enjoys a place in the standard
repertoire.
You may not know that The
Four Seasons was published as a set of 12 concerti that make up his opus 8 entitled
The Contest of Harmony and of Invention. Greenberg recognizes the title as a stoke of marketing
genius that enticed listeners to purchase the work so as to experience a duel
between learned craft and intuitive imagination at a time when concerti
publishing was so highly competitive.
According to Greenberg, Vivaldi “was an egomaniacal, opportunistic,
thin-skinned, greedy, often outrageously dishonest wheeler-dealer.” Not the image you might have of the “Red
Priest,” Abbé Lord Antonio Vivaldi, red-headed violin master, conductor,
composer, and dean of music at the Pieta
girls orphanage in Venice.
The Pieta was just
one of four orphanages where girls learned the most important and popular
Venetian trade: music. Music standards were so high at the Pieta that the daughters of nobility
were sent there to study. Founded in
1346, during Vivaldi’s tenure it became the center of the Venetian music scene. Vivaldi served there for 37 years during
which time he honed his craft to the point where he boasted that he could
compose a concerto more quickly than it could be copied. That boast might lead some today to argue
that after the first 100 or so concerti, that latter ones must have become
rather derivative and predictable. As I
have not listened to all 500, I’ll sidestep any comment on that criticism
although I think it is fair to say that of his violin, flute, trumpet, guitar and
mandolin concerti I have heard, his style is recognizable. Then again, he is credited with institutionalizing the three-movement
“fast-slow-fast” form of concerti movements, so that’s to be expected.
Despite a perfidious and penurious personality and his prodigious
productivity, the uniquenss, virtuosity, and imagery of The Four Seasons is undeniable.
As Ted Libbey’s 1994 edition of The NPR Guide to Building a Classical
CD Collection (yes EV, after 18 years it still gets plenty of use thank you very much!)
puts it:
“The wealth
of effect and the quality of diversion that Vivaldi was able to achieve in The
Four Seasons, using nothing more than string instruments, still compels the
greatest admiration. Their imagery-of
birds in spring, storms in summer, huntsmen in autumn, and icy landscapes in
winter-is as vivid today as on the day the notes were penned.”
N.B. During preparation of this post, I came across the “Classical Notes” of Peter Gutmann (http://www.classicalnotes.net/) who appears to have devoted quite some time to sharing his appreciation of classical music. And on a synchronistic note - as I prepared to complete this post, my Pandora Beethoven station chose to play Joshua Bell's version of "Spring!"
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