TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN
9th Biennial Conference on Baroque Music
ABSTRACT
Vivaldi, Bach and their Concerto Slow Movements
Rebecca Kan
Precious little has been said about Vivaldi’s compositional techniques
during the early part of his concerto writing career. This has impeded
recognition of Vivaldi as the progenitor of the modern Adagio and has consequently
obscured his compositional ability in the concerto slow movements. But
a close examination of Vivaldi’s career up to the end of the first decade
of the 18th century reveals a composer who was willing to overturn the
traditions of his predecessors and create a concerto slow movement that
was well in advance of its time. Vivaldi’s formal inventiveness in the
concerto slow movements had an immediate impact upon Bach, whose keyboard
transcriptions of Vivaldi’s concertos offer a glimpse of what the early
Vivaldi could achieve, particularly at a time when the concerto had just
emerged from its fledgling years. This paper suggests that the extent of
Vivaldi’s influence on Bach’s concerto slow movements advances beyond the
novelty of the embellished Adagio into other compositional dimensions that
first instrumental concerto composers did not know. Examples taken from
the earliest known concertos by Vivaldi attest to the maturity that the
Venetian composer had reached by the time that Bach made his transcriptions.
The application of the ritornello principle in not merely the fast but
also the slow movements of Vivaldi’s concertos spills over into an examination
and comparison of similar procedures in the concerto slow movements of
Bach, suggesting how Vivaldi may have contributed to the fine art of Bach’s
“musical thinking”.
Last updated on 21 March 2000 by Yo
Tomita