Was Vivaldi Bach's teacher? The Venetian influence and the evolution of the concerto.
- Bach Society Brasil
- 1 day ago
- 6 min read
Around 1713, in a small duchy in Thuringia, an organist of less than thirty years of age pored over concertos that had recently arrived from Venice and began to copy them, note for note.
The organist's name was Johann Sebastian Bach . The music was by Antonio Vivaldi . From this encounter was born one of the most fascinating stories of influence on Western music: that it was with the Venetian that Bach learned to think like a composer.
Would you like to see Vivaldi's works, which Bach copied by hand, performed live with Baroque instruments? Don't miss our concert on July 20th in Porto Alegre . Learn more here .
Vivaldi, the architect of the concerto
When these concertos arrived in Weimar, Vivaldi was already the most celebrated name in European instrumental music—and the main person responsible for transforming the concerto into one of the central genres of the Baroque period.
Who was Antonio Vivaldi?
Antonio Vivaldi (Venice, 1678 – Vienna, 1741) was ordained a priest in 1703 and soon stopped celebrating Mass, citing a chest condition he said had accompanied him since birth; he devoted himself entirely to music. Because of his red hair, he became known as il Prete Rosso , the Red Priest. For almost four decades he was music teacher at the Ospedale della Pietà , a Venetian asylum for orphaned, illegitimate, and abandoned girls, whose orchestra and female choir were a tourist attraction in Europe. He left behind about five hundred concerts and died poor and forgotten in Vienna.
To learn about Vivaldi's life in detail—the scandals, his teaching at the Pietà, and the genesis of the Four Seasons—read "Antonio Vivaldi and The Four Seasons" on the Bach Society Brazil blog.
The concerto was not born with Vivaldi. In the last decades of the 17th century, instrumental music gained autonomy and prestige. The dynamic harmonies of Arcangelo Corelli —the linking of fifths, reinforced by melodic sequences and suspensions—became the driving force behind tonal forms. It was music that demanded attentive listening: the exclamation "Sonata, what do you want from me?", recorded by Rousseau in his Dictionnaire de musique (1768), is attributed to the academic Bernard de Fontenelle.
Corelli's concerto grosso involved a dialogue between a group of soloists—the concertino —and the string orchestra, the ripieno . The turning point came from Bologna, with the violinist Giuseppe Torelli , and from the Venice of Tomaso Albinoni : the solo concerto, in which the alternation between tutti and soloist became a structure, not merely a sound effect.
This new concerto adopted the tripartite logic of fast–slow–fast. At the heart of the fast movements is the ritornello form: an orchestral refrain reappears throughout the movement, shortened and in different keys, alternating with episodes from the soloist. The ritornello fixes and unifies; the episodes modulate and showcase the invention.
It was Vivaldi who transformed this scheme into a universal model. Torelli and Albinoni laid the foundations; the Venetian gave them coherence, energy, and an almost physical joy. In about five hundred concertos, he established the design—clear, dramatic, efficient—that would orchestrate a good part of the music of the 18th century.
The concert collection
In 1711, the Dutch publisher Estienne Roger published in Amsterdam the first collection of Vivaldi's concertos, twelve pieces gathered under the title L'estro armonico — "the harmonic inspiration". The collection was reprinted in at least fourteen editions in the following decades and spread Vivaldi's name throughout Europe.
To gauge the impact, it's worth remembering how music circulated back then. Printing sheet music was expensive and laborious, and much instrumental music circulated in handwritten copies. Publishing with Estienne Roger, who specialized in recording modern music in Amsterdam, was a sign of international ambition. It was through this publishing circuit that Vivaldi's music crossed borders and reached a Protestant court in Thuringia.
And there, in Weimar—where he was organist and, from 1714, Konzertmeister (first violin and director of instrumental music)—Bach did not limit himself to admiring. Between 1713 and 1714, he transcribed about twenty Italian concertos for keyboard. Nine of these transcriptions are of Vivaldi concertos, and five came precisely from L'estro armonico . Copying other people's music was, for Bach, a way of dismantling the mechanism from within.
The Bach Society of Brazil holds in its collection a vivid example of this habit: Bach's keyboard transcription of an oboe concerto by Alessandro Marcello (BWV 974), another Venetian composer from Vivaldi's generation, recorded on the harpsichord by Fernando Cordella . Listening to it is to hear what it meant for Bach to "read" an Italian concerto with his own hands.
Bach and Vivaldi: distance learning
The story that Vivaldi "taught Bach how to compose" has an author and a date. It was Johann Nikolaus Forkel , Bach's first biographer, who set it in 1802: according to him, by copying Vivaldi's concertos, Bach would have learned that "there must be order, connection and proportion" — in German, Ordnung , Zusammenhang and Verhältnis .
Modern research corrects the exaggerations. Bach did not only transcribe Vivaldi concertos: there are also transcriptions by Telemann and Prince Johann Ernst of Weimar. But the core of the story remains: as musicologist Christoph Wolff summarizes, the study of Vivaldi was "a critical moment, perhaps the culmination" of Bach's self-taught learning.
The expression that gives this text its name echoes the title of a late collection by Vivaldi, Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione (1725) — the one that opens with The Four Seasons. It is a good summary of what was at stake: the art of combining order (harmony) and imagination (invention).
The rediscovery of Vivaldi
There is an irony that completes the circle. For almost the entire 19th century, interest in Vivaldi survived through Bach. Bach's own transcription of the most celebrated concerto from L'estro armonico , BWV 596, was even published in 1844 as the work of Wilhelm Friedemann Bach; the mistake was only corrected in 1911.
Next, three works to listen to this story up close: two concertos by Vivaldi and the cantata in which the disciple already speaks Italian in his own voice.
Listening Suggestions
RV 565: the concerto that Bach copied
Within L'estro armonico , the Concerto in D minor, RV 565 is the most famous—and the most decisive for this story. Its structure is unusual: an introduction in pulsating eighth notes, a transition in adagio and radiant fugue, followed by a broad Siciliana ( Largo e Spiccato )—one of the first large slow movements entrusted to a solo singer.
It was precisely this concerto that Bach transcribed for solo organ, as the Concerto in D minor, BWV 596. Listening to the two versions side by side is to see, in the same gesture, the raw material and the result of the study.
RV 436: Vivaldi and the new flute
The transverse flute—the traverso , ancestor of the modern flute—was a new instrument in Italy at the beginning of the 18th century. The Concerto in G major, RV 436 , has three movements, Allegro–Largo–Allegro, with the central Largo exposing the flute in cantabile line over reduced accompaniment.
BWV 199: the disciple, already master of the Italian style
If L'estro armonico is the lesson, the cantata Mein Herze schwimmt im Blut , BWV 199, is the fruit. A solo cantata for soprano, oboe, strings and continuo, written in Weimar to a text by Georg Christian Lehms—the new sacred poetry that brought the dramaturgy of Italian opera to church music.
The cantata traverses an emotional arc in eight movements: from despair to exultation. Pay attention to the aria Stumme Seufzer, stille Klagen ("silent sighs, silent complaints"), with the oboe translating pain; and to the chorale Ich, dein betrübtes Kind , in which the soprano intertwines with a solo viola obbligata , an unusual and moving choice of color.
Bibliographic References
HELLER, Karl. Antonio Vivaldi: The Red Priest of Venice. Portland: Amadeus Press, 2003.
WOLFF, Christoph. Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician. New York: WW Norton & Company, 2000.
WILLIAMS, Peter. JS Bach: A Life in Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
TARUSKIN, Richard. The Oxford History of Western Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
DAVID, Hans T.; MENDEL, Arthur; WOLFF, Christoph (Ed.). The New Bach Reader: A Life of Johann Sebastian Bach in Letters and Documents. New York: WW Norton & Company, 1998.
BACH-ARCHIV LEIPZIG. Calendarium: A Timeline of the Life of Johann Sebastian Bach. Available at: https://jsbach.de/en/calendarium.
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