Antonio Vivaldi

Antonio Lucio Vivaldi was born in Venice on 4 March 1678, trained for the priesthood from age fifteen, and was ordained at twenty-five - though a health problem soon excused him from saying Mass. He spent years composing for the Ospedale della Pietà, a home for abandoned children whose all-female ensemble became the vehicle for hundreds of his instrumental concertos and sacred choral works. He pioneered developments in orchestration and violin technique, consolidating the solo concerto into the form Europe would imitate, and staged more than fifty operas in Venice, Mantua, and Vienna. After meeting Emperor Charles VI he moved to Vienna hoping for royal backing, but the Emperor died shortly after his arrival and Vivaldi followed in poverty on 28 July 1741. His music fell into near-total obscurity for two centuries before a twentieth-century revival; compositions once thought lost have surfaced as recently as 2015, and his work now plays in concert halls across the world.