AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Autumn vivaldi violin12/28/2023 ![]() Like the motif in Summer identified as y, the principal figure evokes an uneasy, troubled sense. With frequent dissonance, unpredictable phrasing and extreme tonal dislocation, the Adagio seems rather to represent the fits and starts of confused dreams, and was appropriately reused later in a ghostly context as the movement called ‘Il sonno’ (Sleep) in two versions of La none (RV 104 and 439). ![]() This slumber, after all, is not so very sweet. While the sonnet would have us believe that the season’s fresh air gently ‘invites’ the peasants to sweet slumber, the slow movement’s caption ‘Ubriachi dormienti‘ (sleeping drunks) leaves us in no doubt of the true cause. With the sound of merry-making retreating to the background (violin parts, bars 97-105), the wretched man’s stupor finally induces sleep. From there, the penultimate ritornello restores F major in a welter of new syncopation as the dance dissolves into an unreal, spinning world. Already dangerously wayward, the music’s behavior now takes on a drunk’s capacity for self-delusion: an assured (but premature) return to the tonic key in bars 72-4, followed by a convincing lunge (in the wrong place) to the dominant. The movement’s second phase thus arrives early as if the sudden onset of drunkenness comes as a shock to both inebriate and bystander. Timed with the drunkard’s first serious totter (bar 41), the first change of key is not the normal step to the dominant but the beginning of a radical modulation – to G minor, with its overtones of impending disaster. Thereafter, Vivaldi’s structural game-plan – increasing musical volatility to reflect increasing inebriation – is more subtle than it might at first sight appear. The first movement manages to convey crudeness with artful grace, initially in a repetitive ritornello of primitive’ harmony and a similar first solo rooted to the steps of the peasants’ dance.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |