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After a brief stint as a priest, Vivaldi was first hired by the Pietà as a maestro di violino at age 25 in 1703. This minimized the number of male teachers, contracted one year at a time, in the all-female environment. Music education at the Venetian ospedali was largely based on a peer-teaching system, in which an accomplished senior student known as a figlia di cori ( cori meaning musical establishment as a whole, not just singers) would be assigned to teach younger students. To this day, a marble plaque embedded in the wall of a later church of Santa Maria della Pietà invokes the warning of Pope Paul III in 1548 of dire consequences for parents abandoning children there if they could afford to raise them. Founded in 1336, the Pietà was unique in being both single-sex and accepting infant girls born both in and out of wedlock, provided the child was small enough to fit in a box near the door. Aside from his forty-six operas, most of his five hundred-plus concertos, ninety solo sonatas, and dozens of choral works resulted from his thirty-year association as teacher, conductor, and composer for the orphans in the Ospedale della Pietà, one of four such institutions with prominent musical establishments in Venice. Listen to the best of Vivaldi on Apple Music and Spotify and scroll down to discover our selection of the 10 best Vivaldi works.The vast majority of Antonio Vivaldi’s prolific compositions resulted from his various responsibilities in his long teaching career. Discover our selection of the best Vivaldi works featuring 10 masterpieces including The Four Seasons. He taught the violin there, organised services with music, gave concerts, and composed most of his major works in this position over three decades. In the same year as his ordination he was appointed violin master at the Ospedale della Pietà, a Venetian convent for orphaned or illegitimate girls. He trained for the priesthood and was ordained in 1703. Vivaldi’s concertos became a model for his contemporaries, and the form was soon one of the most important in eighteenth century Europe. He introduced a range of new styles and techniques to string playing and consolidated one of its most important genres, the concerto. But his most important achievement was in his music for strings.
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He ignited transformations in music for the church, the opera house and the concert hall. Antonio Vivaldi’s (4 March 1678 – 28 July 1741) influence on the development of Baroque music was immense.
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