Venice knew him as il Prete Rosso, the Red Priest, for his flaming hair and his holy orders, though he rarely said Mass, pleading asthma and composing instead. For nearly forty years Vivaldi taught the violin at the Ospedale della Pietà, a convent orphanage whose all-female orchestra he drilled into the most celebrated ensemble in Europe. Visitors wrote home in disbelief at girls playing, behind grilles, music of impossible brilliance, much of it written for them the same week.
He composed at a speed that scandalised his rivals: some five hundred concertos, forty-odd operas, sacred music by the ream. The four violin concertos published in 1725 as The Four Seasons became the most famous instrumental music of the entire Baroque. Yet fashion moved on; Vivaldi chased an opera commission to Vienna, and died there in 1741, poor enough to be buried in a pauper's grave.
His rediscovery in the twentieth century restored what Venice always knew, that no one has ever made string instruments sound more alive.
