Francesco Trevisani, Portrait of Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
In 2015 La Serenissima, the ensemble led by the violinist Adrian Chandler, records The Four Seasons for the Avie label. Whoever puts on the disc hears music they know by heart, and yet something is off: the attacks, the slurs, the phrasing are not those they have in their ear. Chandler did not play the printed version. He played the Manchester one, and a few months later he brings it to the concert hall right there, in the city that holds it.
The Four Seasons we all know come from a printed book. In 1725 the publisher Michel-Charles Le Cène issues in Amsterdam Vivaldi’s Opus 8, Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione: twelve concertos, the first four devoted to the seasons and accompanied by sonnets that describe their programme. From that print descend almost all the editions and performances of three centuries. The autograph manuscript, the score in Vivaldi’s own hand, is lost. No Venetian library holds it, and no other does.
Another source remains, however, and its route is a novel. Around 1726, right after the print, a manuscript copy of the concertos prepared for Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni comes out of Vivaldi’s workshop: the great Roman patron, grand-nephew of Pope Alexander VIII and master of one of the richest music libraries in Europe. The parts are written out by a copyist from Vivaldi’s circle, perhaps the composer’s father, Giovanni Battista, a violinist at San Marco and his son’s collaborator all his life. And they bear the marks of Vivaldi’s revision. It is the only fair copy of the Four Seasons that shows his supervision.
Ottoboni dies in February 1740, burdened with debts in spite of his income. His possessions are liquidated to pay the creditors, and the music library is dispersed. In 1742 Edward Holdsworth, an English scholar who knew Italy well, buys a block of Vivaldi concertos on behalf of a friend: Charles Jennens, the librettist of Handel’s Messiah, which that very year received its first performance in Dublin. At Jennens’s death, in 1773, the papers pass to the Earls of Aylesford and remain in the family for almost a century and a half. In 1918 they are bought by Sir Newman Flower, publisher and biographer of Handel, who bequeaths them to the Henry Watson Music Library, the public music library of the city of Manchester. They enter it in 1965.
It is the musicologist Michael Talbot, in the 1970s, who really measures what had arrived in the city: separate parts of dozens of compositions, almost all concertos, among them twelve Vivaldi violin sonatas hitherto unknown and, precisely, Ottoboni’s Four Seasons. The largest collection of Vivaldi manuscripts remains that of Turin, which owes its existence to another case of papers sold and found again.
The differences between the two sources do not rewrite the work: the notes are largely the same. What changes are the articulations, the slurs, the way of dividing phrases, that is, precisely the details that decide the character of a performance. Some variants might preserve a stage earlier than the print; others might correct errors that crept in at the printer’s in Amsterdam. Chandler chose to trust the manuscript, on the argument that a copy checked by the author says more about his intentions than a book engraved far from him. Ottoboni’s parts are still there, in the Central Library on St Peter’s Square, nearly fourteen hundred kilometres from the lagoon.