The texts of the first two sections of Vivaldi’s Gloria are the words of the angels in their announcement of Christ’s birth, words that are sung repeatedly in Christmas music, either in Latin or English:
Gloria in excelsis Deo
Glory to God in the highest
Et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis.
And on earth peace to men of good will.
If you’ve been reading my essays for any length of time, you know that I’m kind of obsessed with the details of a composer’s life, or how a certain piece came to be written, or the meaning of the words in a song. Things can get pretty granular at times! So this essay is an attempt to get at the real Vivaldi, the man behind the wig, as it were. He’s a much more interesting—and complicated—figure than you may have thought. As you sing or listen to his glorious music, I hope you’ll be able to picture him going about his life and dealing with all its complications.
Let’s start with Vivaldi’s father, Giovanni Battista Vivaldi, a resident of Venice. We are told that he was a barber before becoming a professional violinist at St. Mark’s Basilica, a little factoid that raises all sorts of interesting questions: Did that post pay more than barbering? Was Mrs. Vivaldi on board with all this? (They ended up with nine children, so money was very definitely a factor in any employment decisions, as there doesn’t seem to be any hint that the Vivaldis were well off.) How exactly did Giovanni decide to make this rather drastic career change? In any case, sources agree that Antonio’s first violin teacher was his dad. Antonio must have been somewhat of a prodigy, because Giovanni took him around Venice to perform, but I don’t know exactly how this worked. Were they basically buskers? When I first read about this “touring,” I thought my sources were saying that Vivaldi had traveled around Europe à la the young Mozart, but then Giovanni wouldn’t have been around to play at the basilica. No, it was just a hometown thing, a side hustle.
Here’s what you may already know about Antonio Vivaldi:
1. He wrote The Four Seasons.
2. He . . . wrote lots of other stuff, behaving kind of like a one-man composition factory.
3. Ummm, he was known as “the red priest”?
We’ll dispose of #3 first, as that’s the easiest to address: the nickname is a reference to Vivaldi’s hair color, and he was ordained as a priest in the Roman Catholic church at age 25, so that’s that. (Although of course you can’t see his real hair in the picture.)
To begin with this week I’m bringing back some material that I wrote two years ago about the Mozart Requiem. Hey, we’re all in favor of recycling, aren’t we? I was struck by Rutter’s choice to put two sheep- or lamb-related sections together; the “Agnus Dei” from the Latin Mass and Psalm 23 as it is worded in the Book of Common Prayer.
So here’s what I wrote about the “Agnus Dei” back then:
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi-–
“Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world”
And the answer is: an arch. We all know about Roman arches, don’t we? The architectural point, which ties in with the musical point, is that there are matching stones on each side of the arch, each one bending closer and closer to the center, with the top stone, the one that holds it all in place, called the “key stone.” Without that center stone that whole thing collapses.
So I had read in several places that the Rutter Requiem had this arch form with the “Sanctus” serving as the keystone. But after all, that idea may just be something
Talk about a wealth of material! I’m going to talk about John Rutter himself and his writing of our piece and then branch out into the meaning of the text in a couple of followup ones. I’d encourage you to follow the link at the end to some earlier material (including some words from the great man himself via Facebook) that I wrote when we sang the Gloria.
First, a little background about the British music scene at the time of the Gloria. While Rutter had published the Christmas carol “Shepherd’s Pipe Carol” (which the Chorale has sung, although it’s better known to us it as “On the Way to Bethlehem”) at the age of 18, he wasn’t very well known in the UK music world even as he produced a number of other Christmas carols. “Difficult though it is to believe today, back in the 1960s and 70s the UK’s musical establishment was so polarized by the latest contemporary fads and fancies that Rutter’s exceptional talent went largely unremarked.”
Has the thought ever occurred to you that the author/composer/performer of a famous work has a life that’s totally separate from that work? It’s one of those obvious-but-overlooked kind of things. For example, I remember wondering about the life of Sir John Tavener back when my choir sang “The Lamb” for a Christmas concert. He had said about that piece, “‘The Lamb’ came to me fully grown and was written in an afternoon and dedicated to my nephew Simon for his 3rd birthday.” The piece became extremely popular, so much so that there are probably many people who automatically associate Tavener with this piece when they hear his name, just as they associate Beethoven with “dah-dah-dah-DAH.” (Well, Beethoven’s Fifth may be a little more well known.) Or Handel with “The Hallelujah Chorus.” I was particularly struck with the Tavener story because he spent so little time actually writing the piece (if he’s telling the truth, and I assume he is). One afternoon’s effort changed his life, forever associating him with that piece.
You just never know what you’re going to find out when you google something! I assumed (a common action for me) that Franz Biebl was someone who lived several hundred years ago, as the music has a very old-ish feel to me. Perhaps he lived in the 1600’s or 1700’s? And it certainly would never have occurred to me that:
1) the piece has become a favorite of brass bands, particularly marching bands, and 2) the piece was the subject of a lawsuit that went all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States.
But I’ll get to the info on these two fascinating facts in a minute.
I’ve done my usual going-far-afield process in trying to decipher this carol, and found that, as usual, Liberties Have Been Taken with the original text, this one from Catalonia. (That’s a region of Spain that speaks a dialect called Catalan; you may be aware that there’s a separatist movement there that seeks to have independence from Spain. The tune, by the way, is apparently Catalonian also, as I’ve seen no composer’s name anywhere.) To start off this post, then, here’s the original text and a quite literal translation:
These two items show up all over the place in Christmas music. This verse from the modern carol “In the Silence” by Craig Courtney with words incorporating an Appalachian folk song is particularly pointed, as it includes the symbolism quite plainly: