“It was front-page news all over the world,” said Susan Orlando, director of the Vivaldi Edition of the Naïve record label.

This time it was Filippo Giordano, a wool merchant, who put up the money. Eventually Gentili tracked down the remainder and persuaded the owner to sell. (For one thing, whole acts of operas were missing.) Roberto Foà, a banker, bought the available material for the Turin library in memory of a son who had died in infancy. While still in the possession of the Durazzo family, the collection was carelessly split in two, and early in the 20th century one half was donated to a monastery outside Turin.Īlberto Gentili, the expert called in for an evaluation, quickly deduced that the cache, though a treasure, was incomplete. Shortly after Vivaldi’s death a close relation sold the archive to the Venetian aristocrat Jacopo Soranzo, from whom it passed to Giacomo Durazzo, a nobleman of Genoa and a patron of Gluck. As for the rest, he once told an English traveler that he made better money by selling copies directly than by working through publishers.

On an upper floor of the Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria di Torino, in metal cabinets behind a fireproof door, is Vivaldi’s personal archive of clean autograph copies of music never published in his lifetime: some 450 works, including 110 violin concertos, 39 oboe concertos, more than a dozen operas and a raft of sacred music.īetween his death in 1741 and the 1930s, posterity knew little more of Vivaldi than the instrumental works published during his lifetime in collections given opus numbers 1 through 12, including “The Four Seasons” (Op. ALTHOUGH Antonio Vivaldi’s name is synonymous with seaswept Venice, an accident of history has deposited the greatest collection of his music here, by the foothills of the Alps.

Vivaldi edition operas