BWW Blog: Why You Should Drop What You're Doing and Listen to Vivaldi's Spring from The Four Seasons

Before I decided to stay home with my babies I was an elementary school music teacher and I Loved my job with a capital L. Music and the arts have always been an essential part of my life, not just for enjoyment, they are the very air I breathe. They are my connection to all things beautiful and complex, things beyond understanding. Around this time every year I would teach a multi-part lesson on Concertos and Movements to 4th graders and it was one of my favorite parts of the curriculum. It all centered around Vivaldi's Spring.

Okay so here's a quick crash course: Vivaldi wrote The Four Seasons violin concerti as program music. Program music is a listening experience that literally refers to your paper program for information about the piece. It's essentially the marriage of prose and music. In the program, you can read the sonnets that each movement was working to emulate and visualize the scene, powerful stuff. Vivaldi stayed very true to the sonnets he used, some even say he wrote the sonnets for the piece, some think he found them somewhere and wrote around them, you know, folklore. There are four concertos in The Four Seasons, can you guess what they might be? Ding, ding, ding! Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter. Each concerto is broken down into 3 movements that are labeled by their speed in Italian. Allegro meaning "fast", Largo meaning "rather slow" and Allegro again. In fact, all his concertos follow this pattern, fast-slow-fast. So that's the structure; those are the bones of this beauty.

If you were to go see this magnificent piece live your program would include these sonnets. Another useful thing to know is that when listening to a concerto the audience is not supposed to clap between movements. This feels strange because each movement is its own separate song with a beginning and an end but it's proper etiquette. The concerto is meant as one large thought. Since I'm recommending Spring and for the sake of space I'm only going to include its three sonnets - feel free to delve deeper into Summer, Autumn and Winter, I implore you!

Spring (Concerto No. 1 in E Major)
Movement One:

Allegro
Spring has arrived with joy
Welcomed by the birds with happy songs,
And the brooks, amidst gentle breezes,
Murmur sweetly as they flow.

The sky is caped in black, and
Thunder and lightning herald a storm
When they fall silent, the birds
Take up again their delightful songs.

Movement Two:

Largo
And in the pleasant, blossom-filled meadow,
To the gentle murmur of leaves and plants,
The goatherd sleeps, his faithful dog beside him.

Movement Three:

Allegro
To the merry sounds of a rustic bagpipe,
Nymphs and shepherds dance in their beloved spot
When Spring appears in splendour.

Let's just take a second to breathe in the beauty of those sonnets. There's something so simple and so familiar about those descriptions of spring. Once you put that to music though, it's a whole new world of glistening splendor. And there are cool things to look out for, too! For instance, in the first movement the whole mood shifts during the thunderstorm only to quickly return to the light and airy spring we all know and love. And in the second movement Vivaldi actually wanted it to sound like there was a barking dog keeping watch, listen closely and you'll hear the violas playing a low, steady "ruff-ruff" throughout the piece. Listen for the violas again in the third movement as they work to sound like the drone of the bagpipes. Pretty rad if you ask me.

In my classroom, I had a star machine and after explaining the concerto and the movements and the sonnets and the whole "not-clapping" thing to my students we used to listen and watch the stars. In that moment, there were no assigned seats and the only rule was to let go of their worries and enjoy. Feel the music. And I think you should do just that. Happy Spring, friends!

Listen below:

Learn more about it here: https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Four-Seasons-by-Vivaldi

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