Vivaldi began studying for the Catholic priesthood at the age of 15 and was ordained at 25, but was given dispensation to no longer say public Masses due to a health problem.

His father, Giovanni Battista, was a barber before becoming a professional violinist and was one of the founders of the Sovvegno dei musicisti di Santa Cecilia, an association of musicians.

[15] The president of the sovvegno was Giovanni Legrenzi, an early Baroque composer and the maestro di cappella at St Mark's Basilica.

"[20] [21] In September 1703, Vivaldi (24) became maestro di violino (master of violin) at an orphanage called the Pio Ospedale della Pietà (Devout Hospital of Mercy) in Venice; although his talents as a violinist probably secured him the job, he soon became a successful teacher of music there.

[33] A real breakthrough as a composer came with his first collection of 12 concerti for one, two, and four violins with strings, L'estro armonico (Opus 3), which was published in Amsterdam in 1711 by Estienne Roger,[34] and dedicated to Grand Prince Ferdinand of Tuscany.

[37] In February 1711, Vivaldi and his father traveled to Brescia, where his setting of the Stabat Mater (RV 621) was played as part of a religious festival.

[38] The following year, Vivaldi became the impresario of the Teatro San Angelo in Venice, where his opera Orlando finto pazzo (RV 727) was performed.

In the late season, Vivaldi planned to put on an opera entirely of his own creation, Arsilda, regina di Ponto (RV 700), but the state censor blocked the performance.

The cover drawing shows a boat (the San Angelo), on the left end of which stands a little angel wearing a priest's hat and playing the violin.

The Marcello family claimed ownership of the Teatro San Angelo, and a long legal battle had been fought with the management for its restitution, without success.

[41] In 1717 or 1718, Vivaldi was offered a prestigious new position as Maestro di Cappella of the court of Prince Philip of Hesse-Darmstadt, governor of Mantua, in the northwest of Italy[42] He moved there for three years and produced several operas, among them Tito Manlio (RV 738).

Although three of the concerti are wholly original, the first, "Spring", borrows motifs from a Sinfonia in the first act of Vivaldi's contemporaneous opera Il Giustino.

They were a revolution in musical conception: in them, Vivaldi represented flowing streams, singing birds (of different species, each specifically characterized), barking dogs, buzzing mosquitoes, crying shepherds, storms, drunken dancers, silent nights, hunting parties from both the hunters' and the prey's point of view, frozen landscapes, ice-skating children, and warming winter fires.

During his time in Mantua, Vivaldi became acquainted with an aspiring young singer Anna Tessieri Girò, who would become his student, protégée, and favorite prima donna.

[45] At the height of his career, he received commissions from European nobility and royalty, some of which were: Like many composers of the time, Vivaldi faced financial difficulties in his later years.

[46] The reasons for Vivaldi's departure from Venice are unclear, but it seems likely that, after the success of his meeting with Emperor Charles VI, he wished to take up the position of a composer in the imperial court.

Shortly after his arrival in Vienna, Charles VI died, which left the composer without any imperial patronage or a steady source of income.

Soon afterwards, Vivaldi became impoverished[n 6][49] and, during the night of 27/28 July 1741, aged 63,[n 7] he died of "internal infection", in a house owned by the widow of a Viennese saddlemaker.

The engraving, which was the basis of several copies produced later by other artists, was made in 1725 by François Morellon de La Cave for the first edition of Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione, and shows Vivaldi holding a sheet of music.

[54] The oil painting, which can be seen in the International Museum and Library of Music of Bologna, is by an anonymous artist and is thought to depict Vivaldi due to its strong resemblance to the La Cave engraving.

About 350 of these are for solo instrument and strings, of which 230 are for violin; the others are for bassoon, cello, oboe, flute, viola d'amore, recorder, lute, or mandolin.

Scholarly work intended to increase the accuracy and variety of Vivaldi performances also supported new discoveries that made old catalogs incomplete.

Combined Complete Edition (CE)/Fanna numbering was especially common in the work of Italian groups driving the mid-20th-century revival of Vivaldi, such as Gli Accademici di Milano under Piero Santi.

This cataloging work was led by the Istituto Italiano Antonio Vivaldi, where Gian Francesco Malipiero was both the director and the editor of the published scores (Edizioni G. Ricordi).

His work built on that of Antonio Fanna, a Venetian businessman and the institute's founder, and thus formed a bridge to the scholarly catalog dominant today.

[n 8] The German scholar Walter Kolneder has discerned the influence of Legrenzi's style in Vivaldi's early liturgical work Laetatus sum (RV Anh 31), written in 1691 at the age of thirteen.

Many Vivaldi manuscripts were rediscovered, and were acquired by the Turin National University Library as a result of the generous sponsorship of Turinese businessmen Roberto Foa and Filippo Giordano, in memory of their sons.

Some missing tomes in the numbered set were discovered in the collections of the descendants of the Grand Duke Durazzo, who had acquired the monastery complex in the 18th century.

[60] In February 2002, musicologist Steffen Voss [de] discovered 70% of the music for the opera Motezuma (RV 723) in the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin archives.

Long thought lost, it was described by Dutch musicologist Kees Vlaardingerbroek [nl] as "the most important Vivaldi discovery in 75 years.