Franz Joseph Haydn trained at a prestigious choir school in Vienna until his voice broke at 17. He spent the next twelve years teaching kids and later working for a count of modest means, until at 29 he landed the job that set him on the course to become the most famous composer in the world. In 1761, he joined the fabulously wealthy Esterházy family as their Vice-Kapellmeister, followed by a promotion five years later to Kapellmeister. Initially, he was responsible for producing two concerts each week with the court’s private orchestra, and in later years his duties grew to include writing and producing operas. He spent months on end cloistered at the family’s remote summer palace, providing entertainment for the insatiable Prince Nikolaus Esterházy, a pressure-cooker environment in which, as Haydn later wrote, “I was forced to become original.”

One new direction Haydn explored in the late 1760s and early 1770s was the Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) aesthetic that was also cropping up in the theater, literature and art of the time. This tendency toward heightened emotion and drama tends to be associated with Haydn’s music in minor keys, but the same extremes of expression fueled major-key symphonies as well, including the symphony known by the nickname “Fire,” composed around 1768.

Symphony No. 59 is fiery indeed, especially in the unusually speedy Presto first movement punctuated by shuddering bow strokes from the violins and forte blasts from the horns. The slow movement’s key setting of A-minor brings an unexpected chill to the atmosphere, and the Menuet reinforces the dichotomy of major and minor keys. The finale, heralded by horns and oboes, bristles with the manic energy of a hunt.

Aaron Grad ©2023

Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons makes a strong case as the Western canon’s most universally familiar music. Such widespread popularity is a double-edged sword: The Four Seasons’s ubiquity in popular culture has too often presented as harmless background music a fiendishly inventive work by a composer of terrific originality.

The concertos that make up The Four Seasons (Le quattro stagioni) appeared as the first four of twelve violin concertos published as Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione (The Contest between Harmony and Invention), op. 8. Vivaldi composed them to accompany a set of four sonnets—“La primavera,” “L’estate,” “L’autunno,” and “L’inverno”—whose authorship is uncertain but generally attributed to Vivaldi himself. The sonnets’ tripartite structures align with the three movements of each concerto, which in turn provide vivid musical depictions of the corresponding text.

The Four Seasons evinces Vivaldi’s importance to the development of the Baroque concerto. His contributions to the genre, which total more than five hundred, defined the concerto form as a dialog between soloist and ensemble and established certain formal characteristics as standards in concerto writing. (They also established the concerto as a vehicle for instrumental virtuosity—fittingly so, given Vivaldi’s stature as one of the finest violinists of his generation; more than two hundred of Vivaldi’s concertos are for violin.) Vivaldi’s concertos served as significant models for no less than Johann Sebastian Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, among other major works of the Baroque period.

But of equal importance to the formal innovations manifested in works like The Four Seasons are the breadth of their dramatic character and the extent of Vivaldi’s vision in imagining the expressive potential of the concerto form. The Four Seasons concertos are remarkable for their illustration of their subject matter, whether in depicting hunting horns and guns in Autumn or in the chilling texture of Winter, mimetic of the “cold in the icy snow/In the harsh breath of a horrid wind.”

Patrick Castillo ©2012