Towards the end of the seventeenth century, the publication of music underwent a technological revolution. Since the first issue of instrumental music by Ottaviano Petrucci in Venice, 1507, the cumbersome method of printing using a moveable typeface (requiring one piece of type for every note) remained largely unchanged. The resulting prints were hard to read, notoriously inaccurate (particularly regarding the portrayal of slurs) and struggled to transmit any degree of nuance which, as music became ever more complex, was problematic. A practical solution was urgently needed.

In the 1690s, Estienne Roger, a French Huguenot, started a printing house in Amsterdam. The critical difference between his editions and those of the Italian houses, previously considered to be the best in the world, was that the music was engraved onto copper plates. This sped up the printing process, enabled best-sellers to be reissued with ease and, perhaps most importantly, communicated the composer’s intentions to the musicians with clarity and in a legible manner. Vivaldi himself, whose first two publications were issued in Venice, hints at these reasons for switching his allegiance to Roger in the foreword to his Opus 3 (L’estro armonico, 1711). He continued to use this publishing firm until his final collection of concertos, Opus 12 (1729).

Prior to publication, the composer would send his autograph manuscripts (or fair copies made by a trusted copyist) to Amsterdam, the works would be engraved, printed, and put on sale. It was normal for a composer’s manuscripts then to be discarded, explaining why the majority of Vivaldi’s published concertos survive only in Roger’s prints (or pirated copies).

However, the fate of the manuscripts for the Opus 8 concertos has been rather different. In addition to the ‘Manchester’ partbooks, that include concertos I-V in the hands of some of Vivaldi’s best-known scribes, partial or complete autograph manuscripts survive for another six concertos. Complete copies of concertos VIII, IX, X and XI can be found in Vivaldi’s personal manuscript collection held in the Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria, Turin, whilst in the Sächsische Landesbibliothek, Dresden, there survives a bass part to Concerto V as well as the first movement of Concerto VII.

The manuscript of the latter work bears an inscription to Johann Georg Pisendel, the virtuoso violinist of the Dresden court who studied both violin and composition with Vivaldi between 1716 and 1717. Of special interest are the final 25 bars which transmit an entirely different version to that found in the Opus 8 (listeners will be able to hear this on a later release). It seems reasonable to suggest that this was the original version of the concerto and that it was composed during Pisendel’s stay in Venice, lending credence to the hypothesis that most, if not all the concertos of the Opus 8 had been composed much earlier than the suspected publication date of 1725. Indeed, Vivaldi’s epistle honouring the dedicatee of the collection, Count Wenzel von Morzin, suggests that the count was already well acquainted with the set’s opening concertos, Le quattro stagioni.

Turning to the concertos that survive in Turin, again it is noticeable—but not necessarily surprising—that there are significant differences between the manuscript and published sources. In the case of Concerto IX, a work that along with Concerto XII can be played either on the violin or the oboe, the Turin manuscript confirms that it was initially conceived as an oboe concerto. Vivaldi’s efforts to make the concerto ‘violin-ready’ can be seen in changes he made to one solo in the opening movement under the heading violino principale. Interestingly, although it is the violin that is more suited to playing fast passages, here, Vivaldi’s modifications exchange virtuosity for lyricism, dispensing with streams of continuous semiquavers.

Perhaps the most intriguing of the Turin sources is that of Concerto XI. This manuscript started life as a fair copy conveying the concerto almost exactly as it appears in the Opus 8, but in the 1730s, Vivaldi decided to revise the work extensively. (Again, listeners will be able to hear the revised version on a future release.) Vivaldi crossed out large chunks and replaced them with passages copied on new leaves; these were then inserted into the original manuscript or even bound in a different volume altogether, with the result that the outer movements are rendered quite distinct when compared to the concerto’s original draft.

It is worth pointing out that Vivaldi borrows a portion of one of his modifications from another D major concerto, Il Grosso Mogul (RV208), a work that predates the modified version of Concerto XI by two decades or more, thus highlighting the pitfalls of dating a work on stylistic grounds alone. It is interesting that a concerto with oriental associations is linked to Concerto XI, perhaps demonstrating a similar choice of inventio for both concertos; after all, Concerto XI is a work which, to eighteenth century ears at least, possesses its own eastern promise. Whatever the case may be, Vivaldi evidently thought highly enough of this work to use sections of it in other D major violin concertos.

Concerto X, is the only concerto in the second volume of Vivaldi’s Opus 8 to bear a designated name, La caccia (The Hunt), despite the set’s collective title of Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’invenzione (The Fusion of Harmony and Invention). Inventio, to which the title alludes, was one of the five key parts of rhetoric, and was a concept used by painters to help them draw inspiration for their pictorial compositions. Composers used a similar process to help them develop musical ‘figures’ in order to express their ideas or affects in an allegorical manner.

Although Vivaldi gives no further clues regarding the concerto’s enigmatic allegory, as Zavateri’s captions to his concerto A tempesta di mare (The Sea Storm) can intriguingly be applied to Vivaldi’s similarly titled concerto (Concerto V), so the captions given to La caccia, the finale of Vivaldi’s L’autunno (Autumn), can be applied to the present concerto. Thus, we can discern horns, guns, dogs, the fleeing deer and the death of the hunted beast; it is tempting also to imagine the drumming of the horses’ hooves in the ritornellos of the opening movement, a figure which retained here, has been much simplified for the Opus 8.

The final concerto to survive in Turin is that of a work in G minor, Concerto VIII. Although there exist some slight textual differences between the sources, perhaps the most interesting aspect of this concerto are the pedal-cadenzas in the finale. These are reworkings of segments from the third sonata of a set of six by Johann Paul von Westhoff (1656-1705), entitled Imitatione delle campane (Imitation of bells); Vivaldi also uses similar passages in two other violin concertos (RV237 & RV347). Such borrowings are relatively unusual for Vivaldi’s instrumental output, particularly from a work whose provenance was from north of the Alps. As Pisendel must have known the works of Westhoff (once a member of the Dresden Hofkapelle himself), it is likely to have been Pisendel who introduced Vivaldi to their delights.

During his lifetime, Vivaldi composed around 500 concertos, mostly for a single soloist with an accompaniment of strings and continuo; the bulk of these were probably written for the chapel of the Ospedale della Pietà, the Venetian foundling hospital which provided Vivaldi with significant periods of employment throughout his career. Concertos for a single soloist—or even with no soloist at all—would suffice for most chapel services, but sometimes the occasion demanded something a little more celebratory. For special religious festivals, Vivaldi composed either grandiose solo concertos or concertos with more than one soloist. The largest group of these works is a body of around 40 concertos written for identical pairs of instruments with a further 15 for contrasting instruments such as violin and organ, violin and oboe, and violin and cello; only three—for viola d’amore and lute, oboe and bassoon and for oboe and cello—survive in single examples.

As in his solo concertos, it is the violin for which Vivaldi composed the bulk of his double concertos. Around thirty concertos for two violins survive spanning a period between 1711 and 1740. It is difficult to assign precise dates to most of Vivaldi’s instrumental compositions, but we suspect that the concerto in D (RV512) was probably written during the 1730s; this work is heavily influenced by the gallant style, a fashion that Vivaldi embraced increasingly towards the end of his life in order to keep abreast of the trends emanating from modish Neapolitan composers such as Hasse, Porpora and Vinci. The techniques required by both violinists show exactly why Vivaldi’s reputation as a great violinist was undisputed (even by his critics) and why his pupils from the Pietà such as Anna Maria, were said to be among the finest violinists in Europe.

The final concerto to be discussed is unique in the known repertory of Vivaldi. The concerto in G minor (RV155) is a ripieno-solo concerto hybrid; the first two movements are for orchestra alone whilst the final two movements are conceived in the manner of a violin concerto. Given the concerto’s slow introduction and the counterpoint displayed in the first two movements, it is highly likely that this was a concerto written for the church.

The manuscript, again housed in Turin, is unusual as it uses a central European paper in portrait format (as opposed to the standard Italian landscape format) which enables us to ascribe the concerto to the period when Vivaldi visited Bohemia with his father in 1729-1730.

Given the paucity of biographical documentation (as is so often the case with Vivaldi) one is forced to speculate regarding the reasons for this journey. We do know, however, that Vivaldi composed a group of 14 instrumental compositions whilst on tour (all identifiable by their use of Bohemian manuscript paper) of which six were violin concertos. It is tempting to suggest that they were written for Vivaldi himself, but given the disparity in levels of technical difficulty (four are virtuoso in the extreme, two are violinistically facile) it is probable that they were composed for players of differing levels of ability, possibly as didactic works. One potential suggestion we need to consider is the possibility that they were composed in order to fulfil his duties to the Ospedale della Pietà, to whom he was known to have supplied works by post when absent from Venice. A concerto such as the present work in G minor would surely have suited the chapel of the Pietà admirably.

Adrian Chandler © 2025