Antonio Vivaldi

Antonio Vivaldi (1723)

If you don't like this, I'll stop writing music.

Antonio Lucio Vivaldi (4 March 1678 – 27 or 28 July 1741), nicknamed "Il Prete Rosso" (The Red Priest), was a Venetian priest and Baroque music composer as well as a famous violinist. He wrote in excess of 500 concertos plus many operas, overtures, sonatas and sacred vocal works.

Quotes

• Se questa non piace, non voglio più scrivere di musica.
  • Translation: If you don't like this, I'll stop writing music.
  • Quoted in: Michael Talbot (1978) Vivaldi, p. 90
  • An ironic note written upon an aria score of his opera Orlando Furioso (1727).

Quotes about Vivaldi

• Italians have such illustrious people they can celebrate, that everyone celebrates — Michelangelo, Vivaldi and, of course, for us on the left, Sacco and Vanzetti.
  • Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Interview with Democracy Now (2021)

• Overrated: Vivaldi. He has recently become Mr. Baroque, and that is not fair to Bach and Handel. His music does not have the substance, the innovative quality or the passion of the greatest composers. Of course, it's perfectly good music and it makes the listener feel good, but there is no door opening as there is with the great masters.
  • Lukas Foss, quoted in "Judging Composers: High Notes, and Low", The New York Times (March 22, 1987)

• Christopher Hogwood: "Caricaturists of all countries I have a great interest in; I like to observe what happens to an artist's vision when there is a deliberate distortion for the viewer. This is found in Italian art and in much Italian music. Vivaldi sometimes uses caricature in a very serious and grim sense, not at all comic."
  • Veery journal, 1994, interview with Steven Vita

• Robert Craft: “Are you interested in the current revival of eighteenth-century Italian masters?”
  Igor Stravinsky: “Not very. Vivaldi is greatly overrated—a dull fellow who could compose the same form so many times over.”
  • In Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

• Overrated: Antonio Vivaldi. I'm tired of him. Stravinsky once said that Vivaldi wrote the same concerto 500 times. I disagree. Instead, I think he began 500 concertos and never achieved anything in them. So he kept trying over and over again without ever quite succeeding.
  • Charles Rosen, quoted in "Judging Composers: High Notes, and Low", The New York Times (March 22, 1987)