![]() ![]() For now, I am content to listen to recordings while silently following the sheet music, my fingers twitching involuntarily like the post-mortem spasms of a cadaver. The finger-tangling high notes in the first movement require a dexterity in F minor that I was never fully able to achieve. Despite a lifetime of wanting to, I have never been able to play “Winter” it comes too fast, in too challenging a key. Except for the occasional wedding of a friend or family member, my violin lies dormant in a dusty case underneath the desk where I write. “Winter” had surpassed itself, leading me toward a life that I never would have had were it not for this random VHS rental.Īnd it has taught me how to let go. But the sadness of my failure was mitigated by the promise of other passions. Even then I knew that my talent fell short of the mastery required for a real performing career, and I didn’t last long as a music major. I decamped to New York City, where I planned to study music. Ten years of lessons later, my violin skills won me college acceptances and scholarships. The wild arpeggios of the violin sounded like an unspoken truth: Some good little children die in the snow. In “Winter’s” ominous chords, I heard validation the world was harsher than suggested by the cheerful, Disneyfied kid-culture of the 1980s. ![]() Many of my elementary-school classmates faced challenges like Sarah’s: cold, hunger and abuse. In retrospect, the darkness of “Winter” conveyed something I could not articulate as a child, namely, the peculiar sadness of Appalachia, the isolation and the poverty. These sounds felt to me like a crucial directional aid, an encrypted message on a map of my future, an aural Polaris. Yet - and to this day I can’t quite explain why - “Winter” remained in my head.īefore I fell asleep each night, I mentally played the few notes I could remember. ![]() Eventually the VHS of “Sarah and the Squirrel” disappeared from the video-rental store’s shelves. There were no violin teachers in our part of West Virginia, my parents explained. When no violin arrived, I asked for a violin for Christmas. I asked my parents for a violin for my fifth birthday. Better yet, I wanted to learn to play it myself. All of these events are set to Vivaldi’s “Winter.”įrom there, it took the usual route of earworms: Having heard the music, I was desperate to hear it again. In the cartoon’s final frames, Sarah wanders alone and barefoot through the snow. It is under these circumstances of genocide, starvation and exposure to the elements that she befriends (or perhaps hallucinates) a squirrel. She escapes the slaughter by hiding in a nearby forest. Sarah’s village is invaded by Nazis, and her family members are captured and taken to a concentration camp. I sat alone in the living room, watching a cartoon movie called “Sarah and the Squirrel.” It was not the lighthearted fare suggested by its title. A snow-laced mountain fog had settled over the Potomac Highlands of West Virginia. I first heard “Winter” in 1985, when I was 4. Now is the time for “Winter,” a composition that, like the season, holds us in a tighter grip. But, as my fellow millennials know far too well, an ill-timed frost nips yesteryear’s aspirations in the bud. “Spring” is the sassy classical of the baby boomers, music to accompany an anniversary toast at an expensive French restaurant. Vivaldi published the concertos alongside sonnets, possibly written by himself, describing the events of the music in meticulous detail.Antonio Vivaldi’s “Spring” has more than twice as many film credits as any of its counterparts in his Baroque masterpiece, “The Four Seasons.” “Spring” is weddings and day spas, your toddler’s I.Q.-inflating sleep aid. ![]() Timecodes refer to the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra's album Vivaldi: The Four Seasons with Elizabeth Wallfisch as soloist (ABC Classics).Įach concerto has three movements, Fast-Slow-Fast. 45 minutes What to Listen for in Vivaldi’s Four Seasons 1723, Italy Published: 1725, Amsterdam as part of a set of 12 concertos, Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione (The Contest Between Harmony and Invention) Genre: Concerto (set of four) Instrumentation: Solo violin, violins, violas, cellos, double basses, organ or harpsichord Duration: c. 8 Composer: Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741) Period: Baroque Composed: c. Title: Le quattro stagioni (The Four Seasons), op. Here are some key moments to listen out for. They are some of the most extravagant examples of music that tells a story (“program music”) from the baroque period. Vivaldi’s Four Seasons are four violin concertos depicting the seasons of spring, summer, autumn, and winter. ![]()
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