Viva Vivaldi!

Last night I went to the most fabulous concert with A-Joz, one of the fiddlers from my band, and another mutual friend. We had dinner at an Italian restaurant, where Richard Bonomo joined us, then we went to the concert, which was Interpreti Veneziani, a group of guys from Vivaldi's hometown of Venice, Italy. (We got free tickets from someone Hardingfele knows.) They played loads of Vivaldi, including my favorite concerto of his, Opus 3 Number 10, the one for four violins from L'Estro Armonico.

I have always felt a special connection to Vivaldi, ever since he taught me to read music as a child. I was taking Suzuki violin lessons in kindergarten and was only in Book 1 but for some reason had the music and records up through Book 4, which contains the concerto for solo violin in A Minor from L'Estro Armonico. I was so enamored of this piece that I would listen to it over and over while following along in the music book, and it didn't take too long to see that when the musical notes went higher, so did the little black dots on the page. After all, I had recently learned to read English, which is not nearly so logical, so reading music was a snap after that.

Around the time I turned 24, I became totally obsessed with L'Estro Armonico and particularly that Concerto 10 for four violins. I would listen to it over and over and over, and it almost seemed as if it were calling my name and trying to tell me something. I learned everything I could about Vivaldi and was fascinated to learn he was a priest. What, I wondered, had he found so compelling about the Church that he had made such a sacrifice? (Or maybe not that much sacrifice; he was widely rumored to have not taken his vow of chastity too seriously, since he lived with a lovely soprano who was his "housekeeper.") A trip several years earlier to some of the earliest churches in Greece, Turkey and Italy had already planted a seed of curiosity in me about Catholicism, and Vivaldi only made me more eager to learn about it. When people ask me why I became Catholic, I mention having gone to Catholic school as a child and various things like that, but rarely do I mention the Vivaldi connection.

In 1997 I was going to Paris for World Youth Day and dreamed I saw Pope John Paul II go by on the street and wave at me; my friends were all very impressed with the dream and felt it meant something important, but I just thought it was excitement over our upcoming trip. Once there, Ethel and I found ourselves so far back in the crowd that we could barely see the giant screen that displayed the Papal festivities, never mind the man himself. However, we didn't really mind because the crowd was so joyous. A fat lady sang, but things weren't over, and I really wanted to go to a Vivaldi concert that had been in Rouen (or Woon, or whatever) while we were there, but we were too busy getting stuck on rooves, etc. (see my post on this subject) to attend it. The concert had followed us to Paris and was going to be held in the glorious St. Chapelle, so Ethel and I slipped away from the World Youth Day festivities and headed toward the concert. However, all the nearby metro stops were closed for security reasons, and then the police stopped us from crossing the road! Just then the Pope drove by, just like in my dream; and just like in my dream, he smiled and waved right at me. (There weren't that many people around.) Just a coincidence? It's hard to say, but I like to think it was a message from Vivaldi to me.

Famous Hat