L'estro armonico
Vivaldi scholar Michael Talbot described the set as "perhaps the most influential collection of instrumental music to appear during the whole of the eighteenth century".
12 in E major for solo violin and strings, RV 265: In our younger days, the fifth concerto of Vivaldi, composed of rattling passages in perpetual semiquavers, was the making of every player on the violin, who could mount into the clouds, and imitate not only the flight, but the whistling notes of birds.In her preface to the Dover edition, Vivaldi scholar Eleanor Selfridge-Field gives an account of the performance and publication history of L'estro armonico.
In the Pietà, performances of the concertos would have allowed advanced pupils to develop their skills as soloists and given the chance to others to learn how to play in an ensemble.
The dedicatee of the collection, Ferdinando de' Medici, frequently visited Venice from his native Florence and supported the Pietà.
After a concert there in April 1711 featuring an oratorio by Gasparini, Vivaldi's senior colleague, the local Venetian newspaper reported that "the audience, larger than ever, was made ecstatic by the spirited harmony of such a variety of instruments".
Despite originating in a religious institution, the print copies were widely distributed throughout Europe, with 20 reprintings of Estienne Roger's Amsterdam edition between 1711 and 1743.
Sales were slightly more successful than those of Vivaldi's famous 1725 collection Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione which contained The Four Seasons.
[9][10] Talbot (2010) gives a detailed description, drawn from contemporary accounts, of the performances and reception of the concertos in Britain and Ireland in the eighteenth century.
His protègé Charles Avison was almost certainly expressing Geminiani's views when he dismissed Vivaldi's concertos as "defective in various harmony and true invention", a withering reference to Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione.
On the other hand, in London the violinist Matthew Dubourg, another student of Francesco Geminiani, is known to have given many performances of the fifth concerto (at least as early as 1720) and used it for training his pupils; this is recounted by one of them, Francis Fleming, in the autobiographical novel The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Timothy Ginnadrake: At this time he had a great desire to learn the violin, and his father knowing something of it himself, initiated him; he improved so fast that he soon put it out of the power of his father to instruct him.
The old gentleman finding he had a genius for music, engaged a famous musician, one Dubourg, to teach him; he also improved greatly under this professor: the 5th Concerto of Vivaldi was often performed on the stage at the theatre by Tim's master with great applause, as it was thought at that time that it was not in the power of any human being to execute a piece of music more difficult.
[This quote needs a citation]The Irish violinist John Clegg, a child prodigy who studied with both Geminiani and Dubourg, is also known to have been an advocate of Vivaldi's concertos, although no records specifically mention L'estro armonico.
To carry the jest forward, his lordship persuaded the musician to accept the challenge, and he accordingly played over the fifth concerto of Vivaldi.
Carolan, immediately taking his harp, played over the whole piece after him, without missing a note, though he had never heard it before: which produced some surprize; but their astonishment increased, when he assured them he could make a concerto in the same taste himself, which he instantly composed with such spirit and eloquence, that it may compare (for we have it still) with the finest compositions of Italy.
Transcriptions for harp of the third and fifth concertos survive in the collections of another celebrated blind harpist, the Welshman John Parry; they are held in the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth.
The 1797 Encyclopædia Britannica records that the fifth concerto was also played on an Irish variant of Benjamin Franklin's celebrated invention, the glass harmonica.
The most substantial borrowing occurred in the burletta The Golden Pippin, first performed in 1773 at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, with the music of various composers arranged by John Abraham Fisher.
The first movement of the fifth concerto was arranged for the final number, a sextet for the principal characters, Jupiter, Juno, Pallas, Venus, Paris and the Dragon.
6, RV 356, is an important piece in the Suzuki violin method, where students are first introduced to playing in a higher position.
5, RV 519, by far the most popular concerto of the set in the British Isles, was so often performed in public and private that it was simply referred to as "Vivaldi's Fifth".
It is thought likely that many of the transcriptions were made in 1713/1714, when Bach would have had access to a copy of L'estro armonico brought back to Weimar by the young Prince Johann Ernst of Saxe-Weimar after a two-year stay in the Netherlands.
[16] Anne Dawson's Book, part of a bequest of baroque musical manuscripts now held in the Henry Watson Music Library in Manchester, contains arrangements for single-manual instrument of the following concertos: Selfridge-Field describes these as replacing "the virile acrobatics of Vivaldi's violino principale [by] the gentle graces of virginal ornamentation: shakes, coulées, long apoggiaturas, and so forth".
Apart from the arrangement of RV 519 in Anne Dawson's Book, there were many others: L'estro armonico in its entirety has been recorded several times by some of the world's leading orchestras and ensembles.
