Spring (The Four Seasons)

Spring is the first of the four, printed in Amsterdam in 1725 by Michel-Charles Le Cène inside a set of twelve concertos called Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione, the contest between harmony and invention. The music is older than the print. The seasons are usually dated to somewhere between 1718 and 1723, the years around Vivaldi's spell working for the court at Mantua, and some scholars push them back as far as 1716.

Each of the four came with a sonnet, printed above the staves and broken into three parts so that each part sits over the movement it describes. Nobody knows who wrote them. The neatness of that fit is the main argument for Vivaldi having written them himself. He then went further than any composer had, putting the sonnet's phrases into the score at the exact bars they belong to, so the first violin part carries "Giunt'è la Primavera", spring has come, over the opening, then "Canto de gl'Uccelli", the song of the birds, then running streams, then thunder and lightning.

Programmatic music was not new in 1725, but nothing before this had been so specific or so widely copied. The set went around Europe fast, was played in Paris within a few years, then fell out of the repertoire for the better part of two centuries. Its modern life started with recordings in the 1940s and 1950s, and Spring is now one of the few pieces of concert music a person can hear without ever having gone looking for it.

The ritornello is thirteen bars and it is built out of two ideas, each stated loud and then repeated soft. The first is the phrase that turns up in television advertisements, three even notes on G sharp and a drop onto a held B. The second answers it lower down, climbing B to C sharp and falling back to E. Underneath both, the continuo holds E flat out and steps up to B only for the cadence. Two chord letters cover the whole ritornello.

On a mandolin the one real decision is the register. At Vivaldi's own pitch the ritornello never leaves the E course and reaches the ninth fret, so this setting drops it an octave, where it sits across three courses and stops at the sixth fret. The tune keeps its shape and the tab stays readable. It asks for control more than speed: three repeated G sharps that have to match, and a held B lasting six eighths on an instrument whose notes start fading the moment they are struck.