In Summer, the opening bars present the “merciless summer sun” and “man and flock” sweltering under it. The finale is a big dance accompanied by bagpipes, which are represented by droning basses. In the slow movement, a goatherd sleeps under a tree while the second violins represent “the murmuring branches and leaves” and the viola’s repeated notes represent his “faithful dog” (whining or barking, depending on how violists understand the word “grida” written in their part). In Spring’s first movement, we hear the arrival of Spring, the birds greeting it (first solo), brooks and breezes, and a quick thunderstorm. He wrote a sonnet for each concerto explaining what was going on, intended not only as description, but as instruction for performance: the sonnet verses are printed not only as prefaces to each concerto, but also in all the instrumental parts, in the midst of tempo markings and performance directions. Vivaldi was hardly the first composer to depict nature and human activities in instrumental music, but no one had conjured the physical world quite so vividly and concisely with violins before. Part of their appeal would doubtless have been their extra-musical content. By 1725, when Vivaldi published his Opus 8, a set of 12 concertos entitled The Contest between Harmony and Invention, he may well have been the most famous musician in Europe, and the first four concertos of the set, named Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter, were already well known from circulating manuscript copies.
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