Biography
Antonio Vivaldi was born in Venice on 4 March 1678 and received his musical training from his father, a violinist at the Basilica of San Marco. Ordained a priest in 1703 – which earned him the nickname "the Red Priest" for his hair colour – he soon stopped celebrating Mass because of a chronic respiratory ailment and instead spent nearly four decades, from 1703 to 1740, as violin teacher and later concert master at the Ospedale della Pietà, a Venetian orphanage. Alongside instrumental works such as the concertos "L'estro armonico" (1711) and "The Four Seasons" (1725), he composed numerous operas for theatres in Venice, Mantua, Rome and Verona; in a letter to his patron, the Marquis Bentivoglio, he himself put their number at 94, of which around 50 are documented today. In 1740 he left Venice for Vienna to seek the favour of Emperor Charles VI, but lost any prospect of court employment after the emperor's death. Impoverished, Vivaldi died in Vienna on 28 July 1741 and was buried at the parish's expense.
On Stagelog
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