Antonio Vivaldi
1725
Antonio Vivaldi was an ordained Catholic priest who spent most of his career surrounded by teenage girls, and before you raise an eyebrow, it was entirely above board — technically. He was employed at the Ospedale della Pietà in Venice, an orphanage for girls that doubled as one of the finest music conservatories in Europe. The girls performed public concerts that drew audiences from across the continent. Vivaldi composed for them, conducted them, and turned the Pietà into a cultural powerhouse. He also carried on an extremely public relationship with a former student named Anna Girò, which eventually got him in enough trouble with the Church to end his career.
The Four Seasons was published in 1725 as part of a larger collection called 'The Contest Between Harmony and Invention,' which is the most Italian title imaginable. Spring — the first concerto in the set — comes with a sonnet, possibly written by Vivaldi himself, that describes birds singing, brooks flowing, and a thunderstorm rolling through. The violin literally imitates birdsong in the opening measures. This was cutting-edge programmatic music in 1725, and audiences went absolutely wild for it.
What most people don't realize is that The Four Seasons was forgotten for nearly two hundred years. After Vivaldi's death in 1741 — broke, in Vienna, buried in a pauper's grave — his music essentially vanished. It wasn't until the 1920s that scholars began rediscovering his manuscripts, and the modern Four Seasons craze didn't ignite until the 1950s when a series of recordings brought it to a mass audience. Every restaurant, elevator, and telephone hold system on earth has been playing it since.
Vivaldi wrote over five hundred concertos in his lifetime. Stravinsky reportedly quipped that he wrote the same concerto five hundred times. That's unfair but funny, and Vivaldi — a redheaded priest with a gambling habit and a taste for drama — would probably have appreciated the wit even as he composed something devastating in response.