Hugo Ticciati: Vivaldi the baroque rock god
The Ospedale della Pietà was a convent, an orphanage and also a music school in Venice. It still stands today, although the niche in one of its walls, known as the scaffetta, where unwanted babies could be anonymously deposited, is gone. Like Captain Coram’s London foundling hospital, Italian orphanages were committed to providing an education for the children in their care. In Italy, however, there was a strong emphasis on vocational training in music. In fact, the modern word “conservatoire”, meaning an academy of music, derives from the Italian conservatorio, meaning orphanage.
Antonio Vivaldi joined the Pietà in 1703 as a violin teacher, and worked there for the best part of 30 years as de facto director of music and composer in residence. The wonderful music he wrote to be heard there was all performed by female musicians, and that includes his sacred vocal music, in which every part was sung by women. The Sunday concerts he staged were a major attraction both for the Venetian nobility and the many foreign visitors who, then as now, flocked to the city.
Antonio Vivaldi, 1678 – 1741
A French visitor, Charles de Brosses, wrote about the attractions of the performers: “There is nothing so charming as to see a young and pretty nun in her white robe, with a sprig of pomegranate blossoms over her ear, leading the orchestra and beating time with all the grace and precision imaginable.” This was a theme repeated by many of the men who attended concerts at the Pietà. In perhaps the most famous account, Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Confessions described the music he heard there as “voluptuous and affecting”. “The richness of the art, the exquisite taste of the vocal part, the excellence of the voices, the justness of the execution, everything in these delightful concerts concurs to produce an impression ... from which I am of opinion no heart is secure.” Rousseau also lamented the fact that the musicians were generally hidden from view behind a metal screen: “What vexed me was the iron grate, which suffered nothing to escape but sounds, and concealed from me the angels of which they were worthy.”
What did Von Uffenbach mean when he says he was frightened by Vivaldi’s playing?
Rousseau’s visit would have been made a few years after Vivaldi’s death; other travellers who did get to see the composer in the flesh commented on the passionate temperament of the “red-haired priest” (il prete rosso) who directed proceedings. Visiting Venice in 1715, German traveller JFA von Uffenbach recorded his impressions of Vivaldi’s violin playing. He played a “splendid” solo, Von Uffenbach noted, followed by “a cadenza that really frightened me, for such playing has not been heard before and can never be equalled: he brought his fingers no more than a straw’s breadth from the bridge, leaving no room for the bow – and that on all four strings with imitations and incredible speed.”
What did Von Uffenbach mean when he says he was “frightened” by Vivaldi’s playing? We wouldn’t nowadays normally find anything scary in the sounds made by a virtuoso violinist. The answer, I think, lies in Vivaldi’s ability to create a living drama of characters that play with the listener’s expectations and responses. Not only does he pit the soloist in virtuosic display against the dynamic drive of the orchestra; he also creates a thrilling narrative by harnessing the tonal language, dramatically building and releasing harmonic tensions. In his ritornello form, the main thematic material “returns” at different junctures, but “dismembered and intermingled” as the flautist Johann Joachim Quantz wrote in 1752, adding yet another character to the spectacle.
To understand the effect Vivaldi’s music had on those who first heard it, we need to make the music strange again.
In this way he unashamedly manipulated his listeners, getting inside their heads, playing with their emotions. Vivaldi had an economic as well as artistic need to keep his audiences coming back, and to present them with exciting music.
In today’s world, where we exist in a more or less constant haze of tonal music, we take the raw emotional power of the music that emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries by, for example, Vivaldi, Corelli and Bach, for granted.
Hugo Ticciati (right) and O/Modernt
In order to understand the effect Vivaldi’s music had on those who first heard it, I think we need to shock ourselves. We need to make the music strange again. Paradoxically, the best way to do this is by turning to a very familiar modern genre. Music historian Richard Taruskin provides us with an important clue. An “aggressive performance” of Vivaldi’s music was matched by “an equally aggressive audience – a house full of shouting, clapping, stamping listeners”, he writes, adding that “any rock video will provide a living example” of the kind of thing we are talking about. The comparison suddenly becomes clear: Von Uffenbach reacted to Vivaldi on the violin in the way audiences at a Guns N’ Roses gig respond to one of Slash’s virtuoso guitar solos – November Rain, for example.
It’s no accident that, when they were looking for inspiration, acts such as The Beatles, Procol Harum, Percy Sledge, Queen, Sting and many others didn’t turn to the lush harmonies and expansive melodies of 19th-century Romanticism. They turned instead to the groove of a recurring bassline, to melodic extemporising over a chord progression, and to the unwritten freedom offered by the clarity and symmetry of baroque forms.
The term baroque ('misshapen pearl') was coined to describe the grotesquely aberrant music of a previous age.
The term “baroque” (Portuguese for “misshapen pearl”) was first coined by supercilious Frenchmen to describe what they deemed the grotesquely aberrant music of a previous age. But the age of the basso continuo has supplied a wealth of musical pearls for modern rock musicians to reshape. In any case, despite its pejorative intent, the image of the “misshapen pearl” doubtless conjures up something essential about much of the music of the baroque era, and nowhere more so than in the extravagances of Vivaldi.
These are the connections that I and the O/Modernt chamber orchestra will seek to exploit in our London debut on 22 October, in a concert we’re calling Vivaldi Rocks!. Several works by Vivadi are played predominantly as written – the main difference being the use of the Hammond organ as the basso continuo. Pieces by Metallica, Dream Theater and Muse are interspersed between the movements of the Vivaldi, pointing up the many connections. For example, the pedal points, bass lines and instrumental character of Metallica’s Orion forge links with Vivaldi’s Concerto for Two Cellos, performed on bassoon and double bass. In Vivaldi’s La Folia (which appropriately means “madness”), each soloist improvises a rock-inspired “cadenza”. The music is performed as one continuous sequence, with smooth transitions achieved by juxtaposing related harmonic areas, or exploiting rhythmic motifs and improvisations. As the concert progresses, one becomes increasingly aware of the emotional affinities between Vivaldi’s music, heard 300 years ago in Venice, and the global phenomenon that is modern rock. Although the Vivaldi is ostensibly presented in a way that retains “authenticity” (whatever that really means), in its new context it comes to sound more and more like contemporary rock.
It’s a case of mixing the strange and the familiar, and in one sense we take a very traditional approach. Since time immemorial, the past has been one of the most important sources of inspiration for artists in every creative field. The name of the festival I direct in Stockholm is “O/Modernt”, a Swedish expression that translates into English as “Un/Modern”. In practice, this means celebrating the act of looking back to find something innovative and original: using imaginative programming to explore vital connections between old and new.
The aim is always to encourage audiences to experience older composers in new ways, not by spicing up their works with sonic gimmickry but rather by placing them in exciting, challenging and unusual, but always musically coherent contexts. And that is what we are aiming to achieve in London by using the music of Metallica, Dream Theatre and Muse to draw out the very special character of Vivaldi’s music.
To quote the great John Cage: “The past must be invented; the future must be revised.”
Vivaldi Rocks! – Gut Strings and Metal with O/Modernt Kammarorkester is at Kings Place, London, on 22 October. The next O/Modernt festival is at Ulriksdals Castle theatre, Stockholm, in June 2017.