Episode Details

Antonio Vivaldi was the most famous musician in Europe during his lifetime. Within a decade of his death he was completely forgotten. It took nearly two hundred years for scholars to rediscover that this supposedly minor Baroque figure had written over 500 concertos and invented the modern concerto form.

This episode traces Vivaldi from his ordination as a priest who never said Mass to his years running an orphanage orchestra that became one of Europe’s premier ensembles.

• He was ordained as a priest but excused from saying Mass, reportedly due to chronic asthma
• He composed most of his works for the all-female orchestra at Venice’s Ospedale della Pieta
• His manuscripts were nearly destroyed before a monastery sale rescued them in the 1920s
• The Four Seasons is now one of the most recorded pieces in classical history