The challenge of Vivaldi

Abstract

No one needs telling that in terms of sheer quantity (well over 200), historical importance and, arguably, also musical value, Vivaldi's concertos for solo violin form the core of his oeuvre. But their very number and diversity makes them difficult to break down into subgroups convenient for programme planners and record companies. Traditionally, the eight published collections (opp.3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11 and 12) containing violin concertos have provided the central reference point. After all, did Vivaldi not commit what he regarded as his best concertos of this kind to print, giving them into the bargain a special final polish? Unfortunately, the situation is not quite so simple. First, the final polish was often superficial, and certainly not enough to prevent music publishers from misinterpreting the composer's notation, allowing his original errors to stand or introducing fresh errors of their own. Second, the corpus of published Vivaldi concertos is far from being a fully representative selection. Publication—placing in the public domain—implies by its very nature, in the context of Vivaldi's time, a homogenization and a renunciation of the conceptually, technically or aesthetically extreme. So Vivaldi's most difficult, structurally most original and aesthetically boldest violin concertos simply do not make an appearance within the published works and have to be sought individually in manuscript sources—in particular in the portion of the composer's own working collection that today forms the Turin manuscripts. To take full measure of these works requires, besides very extensive research, an insider's knowledge of violin technique that few Vivaldians since Marc Pincherle and Walter Kolneder have possessed.