Vivaldi facts for kids: 15 things to know

Antonio Vivaldi was an Italian composer and violinist who lived from 1678 to 1741. Here are 15 facts about him for a school project, a poster, or a composer study. Each one is short enough to copy onto a card.

His life in Venice

1. He was born on March 4, 1678, in Venice, a city built on water.

2. His father was a barber who became a violinist at the great church of St. Mark’s. He taught his son to play.

3. He trained as a priest and was ordained in 1703. People called him the Red Priest because of his red hair.

4. He had trouble with his breathing all his life. He soon stopped leading church services, and music became his full-time work.

5. He stayed a priest for the rest of his life, even though he no longer led services.

The girls’ orchestra

6. For much of his career, he worked at the Ospedale della Pietà. It was a home in Venice for girls who had been orphaned or abandoned.

7. He taught the girls the violin and wrote new pieces for them to play. Their orchestra became famous, and visitors to Venice came to hear it.

8. The girls played and sang from a gallery behind a metal screen. The audience could hear them and could not see them well.

His music

9. He wrote more than 500 concertos. More than 200 of them are for the violin.

10. The Four Seasons is a set of four violin concertos, printed in 1725. He printed a poem with each one and marked in the music what each part shows: birds, a storm, a barking dog, and chattering teeth.

11. He wrote almost 40 concertos for the bassoon, an instrument that few composers of his day gave solos to.

12. He wrote fast. He boasted that he could compose a concerto faster than a copyist could write it out.

13. He wrote dozens of operas and traveled to stage them.

Lost and found

14. Tastes changed as he grew older. He moved to Vienna in search of work and died there in 1741 with little money.

15. His music was nearly forgotten for about 200 years. In the 1920s, a large collection of his handwritten scores was found, and musicians began to play him again.

One more

Bach was seven years younger than Vivaldi and admired his concertos. Bach rewrote several of them for keyboard, which is one way he learned how a concerto is built.

Three things people get wrong

“He wrote one famous piece.” The Four Seasons is four of more than 500 concertos. He wrote church music and operas as well.

“He was always famous.” He was famous in his prime, forgotten for about two centuries, and found again in the 1900s.

“He gave up being a priest.” He did not. He stopped leading services because of his health.

Things to do together

Make a poster. Pick five facts. Write each one in a box and draw a picture for it.

Quiz night. Turn ten of the facts into questions. Take turns asking them.

Find the dog. Play the second movement of “Spring.” Listen for the two rough notes in the viola. That is the barking dog.

Behind the screen. Play a piece from behind a door or a curtain. Ask the listeners to guess the instrument.

Find Venice. Look at a map of Italy. Find Venice, and look at a photo of its canals.

Print and play

Print the Vivaldi fact sheet and the Four Seasons listening page. Read Vivaldi for kids for his life story and the pieces to play first. For a closer listen, see The Four Seasons guide. Test what you know with the composer quiz.

For more composers by era, see classical composers for kids.