Vivaldi

Let's turn to a film scene to understand the 'Vivaldi effect'. In Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, set in 1770, two young women, Marianne and Héloïse, sit at a harpsichord (video). Héloïse asks what an orchestra sounds like—she has never heard one. Marianne plays for her: a descending motif with resonant chords beneath it. Despite the historical distance, the scene feels instantly familiar today. Few classical works are as universally known as The Four Seasons.

As Marianne plays, she describes the summer storm that echoes through the music. She evokes the restless insects, the wind, the lightning, the thunder. It is precisely the narrative quality of this music that explains its enduring appeal. Vivaldi was a pioneer of programmatic music—music that tells a story. He added sonnets to The Four Seasons that describe in detail what can be heard in the score. The poems may not have been litrary masterpieces, yet this approach turned the four concertos into an instant success. Just as important were the evocative titles—Le Quattro Stagioni, La Tempesta di Mare, La Stravaganza—which set the scene before a single note had sounded. Long before Haydn and Berlioz, he understood that storytelling speaks more directly to the emotions and lingers longer in the memory than abstract music.

As Marianne continues at the harpsichord, she repeats the descending melodic line, again and again. The motif is simple, memorable—just as Héloïse’s gaze lingers on Marianne. The erotic tension is palpable. Another element that makes Vivaldi’s music irresistible is repetition. His hallmark was the ritornello, in which a musical theme is introduced at the outset and then returns in varied guises—a Baroque version of the sample, you might say. The technique inspired many contemporaries, among them Johann Sebastian Bach. He studied Vivaldi’s work closely, even transcribing it for harpsichord. Above all, he reworked those ritornellos in his own music, most famously in the Brandenburg Concertos. His sons, Carl Philipp Emanuel and Johann Christian, in turn absorbed that influence into their own concertos.

However beloved Vivaldi was in his lifetime, his popularity didn't last. The Baroque style fell out of fashion and, after his death, he was largely forgotten. So how did he make it back into the concert hall? Cinema probably had something to do with it. In the twentieth century, many of Vivaldi’s manuscripts were rediscovered. The American violinist Louis Kaufman began to champion the Baroque composer’s work. When he performed The Four Seasons at Carnegie Hall in 1947, Vivaldi woke from two centuries of silence and became a sensation again. It is perhaps no coincidence that Kaufman was instrumental in this revival. A familiar figure in Hollywood—he played on the soundtracks of Gone with the Wind and Casablanca—he had a keen instinct for music with cinematic flair. Since then, Vivaldi has not only reclaimed the classical stage but has become inseparable from popular culture and cinema, from romantic comedies and period dramas to action films. His celebrated Concerto alla rustica proves equally at home in Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz as in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette.

In Portrait of a Lady on Fire, after several attempts, Marianne falters while playing The Four Seasons. ‘You'll come to know the rest of it when you move to Milan,’ she tells Héloïse, ‘it's a city full of music.’ The film’s blazing finale fulfils that promise.

Vivaldi always returns. Ritornello, anyone?