Each line of the respective sonnet is also printed over descriptive passages throughout the score in all the parts explaining the programmatic action. The Amsterdam edition includes accompanying sonnets (presumably by Vivaldi) preceding the concertos in the solo violin part. In addition to an Italian manuscript set of instrumental parts, there are two printed editions (by Le Cene of Amsterdam, 1725, and Le Clerc of Paris, 1739). There are three eighteenth-century sources for The Four Seasons. The effects are at times achieved with considerable sophistication.
It is clear that Vivaldi knew how to reflect the eighteenth-century’s interest in programmatic delineation from the pictorial details in this music - bird sounds, murmuring springs, a barking dog, the insecure walk of the inebriate, a hunt scene and a winter skater’s ungraceful slip on the ice. In it he exercised his imaginative powers with great aplomb, accomplishing a quadruple evocation of mood as well as incorporating striking elements of realism. Here Vivaldi did indeed put harmony and invention to the test by writing an early and lengthy example of orchestral program music, perhaps the first such treating the seasons. Together, these four concertos constitute the first third of his Opus 8, a collection of twelve concertos dedicated to a Bohemian Count which were published in Amsterdam in 1725 under the title Il Cimento dell’ Armonia e dell’ Inventione, or the testing of harmony (representing the rational side of composition) and invention (imagination).
Vivaldi’s musical theater in Le Quattro Stagioni (The Four Seasons) was Nature in her four changing guises. Even architecture took on semblances of the theater Versailles and its gardens look like a stage set. The sense of expression and theatrical awareness had many manifestations. Vivaldi, himself, was fully immersed in it. Baroque composers began earnestly exploring music’s expressive powers and, with the development of opera during that period, became actively involved with the theater.
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