The fast movements also possess an essential third dimension: a structure that can unfold like a dramatic plot and even be transmuted somewhere along its course. We observed how his movements function – even without the prop of a programme – in at least two dimensions: a foreground in which ‘events’ and musical vocabulary strike the imagination, and a background forged from key, metre, tempo and figurative relationships that places the foreground in some kind of context, whether tangibly meaningful or not. Nevertheless, Vivaldi manages to maintain feeling while indulging in vivid painting. One cannot say, as Beethoven said of the ‘Pastoral’ Symphony, that the Seasons are ‘more the expression of feeling than painting’.
Their collective integrity exists nonetheless, residing to some extent in inter-textual relationships but principally in Vivaldi’s approach to different seasonal pictures: a consistency of method, through which distinct ideas are shown to be complementary. Taken at face value, the works seem individualized, concerned only with their own narratives. 8? Such uncertainties leave us blinkered when it comes to appraising the music – and the concertos themselves, far from providing answers, serve to confuse us all the more. When were the sonnets written, and by whom? Was the music based on the poetry or vice versa? Were the programme’s ideas Vivaldi’s own? Why were extra explanatory captions added for the works’ publication in Op. Several interrelated questions need to be answered before a reasonably complete view of Vivaldi’s actions can ever be reached.
It is ironic that The Four Seasons, some of the best-known music of all time, remain an enigma.
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