That seems to favor asthma as the most likely culprit (in the 17th century, asthma could have been extremely debilitating), but obviously there are other possible explanations. Since Vivaldi was an accomplished violinist who sometimes performed with his own orchestra on opening night, we can assume that he had excellent fine motor coordination skills and had reasonably high stamina as long as he didn’t need to stand or speak. This “constriction of the chest,” which Vivaldi struggled with since infancy, has been described by various people as asthma, angina, or an unspecified neurological condition. I usually go outside immediately after lunch, though never on foot … My travels were always very expensive because I always took along four or five persons to assist me.” “ No nobleman calls me to his house, not even our prince, because they all know of my condition. I therefore spend most of my life at home, which I can only leave in a gondola or coach, because my chest ailment or constriction of the chest does not permit me to walk … “After being ordained a priest I celebrated Mass for a year or somewhat longer, after which I stopped because my ailment forced me to leave the altar three times without finishing Mass. As he explained in a letter to his patron: Vivaldi was given a special dispensation not to perform Mass because, even as a young man, he sometimes couldn’t physically make it through the Eucharist. From the very beginning, Antonio Vivaldi found it difficult to breathe.
#Where did antonio vivaldi live free
But even if we stick to the things we can figure out, the red priest of Venice led a really, really interesting life.įeel free to Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel if you like this video! 1. So who was he? For the most part, we’ll never know the amount of documentary evidence surrounding his life was impressive by the standards of his era, but pretty scant by the standards of ours. Even our historical assessment of Vivaldi contains contradictions: it is often said that his music went ignored for two centuries, but he dominated European classical music at his peak and was later a primary influence on J.S.
In his personal life, he was accused of being both a celibate eunuch and a promiscuous sleazeball, his music of being both too trite and too nontraditional.
He was a priest who couldn’t perform Mass, a traveler who couldn’t walk to the grocer on his own, a correspondent of nine princes who was buried in a pauper’s grave. Outside of the large sums of money (which dried up soon enough), there’s not much truth to any of that. If you see him as the archetypal composer of his era, you might imagine a relatively healthy, sheltered aristocrat who was paid large sums of money to create dinner-party entertainment for the idle rich. But he isn’t very well known as a person, so it’s understandable that we might get an unrealistic impression of who he was.
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