Vivaldi's Girls

June 1693 Venice

June 1693

VeniceAntonio's birth in the year of Sixteen Seventy-Eight was marked by the evil eye. On that day, there was an earthquake in the city, the first in distant memory, and his health was said to be weak from the beginning. Just out of his mother's womb, Antonio coughed and sputtered, his chest heaving in great attempts to draw in air, and his family thought he would expire before sunset on the same day. So, the midwife baptized him that very afternoon, an act condemned by the priests of Venice as insufficient and against God's will. But Antonio's mother, weakly recovering from a difficult birth, feared that the baby – now breathing – would die in her arms and go to hell without a proper baptism.

Antonio Vivaldi was born the same year that I was. His family was not as distinguished as my own; his father was just a barber.

Giovanni Vivaldi was busy trying to make money to provide food for the family and was out of the house on that day. He learned of the birth and baptism from a friend in the square.

The infant Antonio survived. He spent many years of his youth with suppressed breathing, a fate which followed him into later life. In our earlier years, as with most children, the riches of our parents seem to be only a veneer upon life itself; we didn't distinguish between those who had more and those who had less, if we were in each other's company. I sympathized with Antonio's plight, but my father convinced me that it was on no consequence for us.

“Don't mind him,” he said. “He's just a musician.”

Whenever I spoke with Antonio over the years, his voice always seemed to be squeezed out between breaths, sometimes almost a wheezing sound. I listened carefully so that I could catch his words, but my father's own words replayed themselves in my memory.

Antonio's father possessed some musical talent and it was this that offered some slight reprieve from the duties of serving as a barber to the moneyless class. His abilities with musical instruments were modest, enough to give his son and other eight children an opening to the world of concerts and operas, but not enough to distinguish himself in the upper class of maestri in Venice.

Although he sought talent in his progeny, Giovani despaired of any true musical excellence in his offspring. He believed that they wasted the opportunity – or were simply not up to it.

But Antonio was different. From an early age, he displayed an uncanny ability to perform on the violin. He was all but prohibited by his parents from learning the wind instruments; his thin breaths and harsh breathing would never have let him succeed at that assignment.

When he was only fifteen years of age, Antonio's parents offered him to the Church for a life in the priesthood. His mother was probably still in dread of the evil eye she said hovered over his life. Antonio's father was more practical. With eight other children, Master Giovanni just wanted his precocious son to find a solid career in the cloth.

By this year, Antonio had already applied his musical genius to write a liturgical hymn. Laetatus sum was a brilliant and joyful composition that combined exquisite orchestration with soaring vocals and seemed to bring heaven down to earth. Perhaps Giovanni's fantasies for his young son's advancement were well placed. Priesthood and the studies that determined it would come first, however, and no one could tell how one pursuit might affect the other.