"Why is there a perfectly good piece then ruined by some fascetta or whatever the word is opera."
But that's never stopped me . . .
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If you're wondering about the slow middle movement in each of the twelve Vivaldi concertos that I linked above . . .
Practically all Vivaldi concertos follow that three-movement structure of fast-slow-fast (allegro-adagio-allegro).
The change in the middle of the concerto has a reason.
The switch to brisk and happy to a slow, contemplative, casual, strolling, quiet, sad, wistful, dreary, dull, sleepy, boring--
Er, where was I?
The relaxed middle movement provides contrast to the rest of the concerto, adding dimension, depth, and variety.
Or so I'm told.
Luckily, modern computer technology lets us skip forward to the brisk third movement.
(Another reason to listen on a computer, not a radio, as I suggested earlier.)
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The middle slow movement was not Vivaldi's forte, but then it's not really anyone's best music--a tempo slower than your heartbeat hardly stirs the blood.
In the hands of Rossini, however, a slow movement builds wonderfully to the Lone Ranger galloping across the Alps--
Er, Rossini's pastoral Call to the Cows in William Tell builds up until it explodes in the March of the Swiss Soldiers (without any silver bullets):
Actually, Rossini does it twice here--the slow Prelude builds up to the Storm at 3:05, then the lovely Call to the Cows begins at 6:02 and provides the contrast to the trumpet blasts that everyone now anticipates at 8:45.
***
But you may not have been asking why we have to sit through the middle slow movement of a baroque concerto
Instead, you may have simply stumbled across a nice Vivaldi sinfonia and been horrified when a complete opera ensued with a baroque chamber orchestra playing desperately against baritones and sopranos howling in nearly incomprehensible Italian.
What's a sinfonia?
Just as allegro-adagio-allego boils down to fast-slow-fast (or happy-sad-happy) . . .
So does the sinfonia played before an opera boil down to this-is-a-shortened-concerto-played-to-get-the-damn-opera-audience-to-stop-talking-and-take-their-seats.
Vivaldi recycled a number of concertos into sinfonias when he began writing the music for almost fifty operas.
I skip Vivaldi's operas because they illustrate Benchley's complaint that “Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings.”
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That is, opera music is often ill matched with action.
The far more successful operas like the modern Superstar or Evita have people actually talking to each other about complicated problems, rather than prolonged arias that amount to saying ouch, I've been stabbed in the back.
One way to illustrate the opera problem is the Four Seasons, the first four concertos of Vivaldi's twelve-concerto Op. 8, the Contest between Harmony and Invention, often cited now as the most recorded music of the Baroque, played by hundreds of orchestras:
There's even a cottage industry now of different instruments playing just the Storm presto third movement from Summer.
Here's the way the Storm was written for a chamber orchestra:
Here's a solo virtuoso showing off the presto:
And here for contrast is an electric guitar doing its best:
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So what's the point to be learned about Vivaldi's opera from the Four Seasons?
Well, apart from seizing an excuse to listen to the Summer presto several times . . .
You'd never know that the original scores for each of the Four Seasons were published with individual sonnets in Italian to be read with the music:
The music endured, but the dialogue is largely forgotten.
Similarly, a lot of what you called perfectly good pieces are then ruined by a fascetta opera, where dialogue is stuck into the cracks of essentially chamber orchestra (a small band or fascetta) music.
Webber and Rice succeeded because they wrote the music for the lyrics instead of just gluing existing concertos to whatever words were handy.
[ducks before outraged largo-lovers, opera-buffs, and electric-guitar-aficionados can purchase rotten tomatoes and reply]
Thanks again for a chance to wallow in Vivaldi instead of working on why the doctor's pdf won't display.
(The doctor's EMR program received a text error message and then hid it inside an inappropriate *.PDF file, which led Adobe Reader to throw up its hands in despair, somewhat like Vivaldi shoe-horning an intricate baroque concerto into an opera about the Aztec emperor Montezuma.)
