There, the professor discovered 14 volumes of dust-covered compositions bearing the name of Antonio Vivaldi-the Red Priest.
In a basement vault, Gentili was presented with an enormous library of little-known musical texts. In the autumn of 1926, Alberto Gentili, a music professor at the University of Turin, was sent to the Salesian College of San Carlo to evaluate a collection of music. But such it was for the Red Priest, and for almost 200 years, no one spoke his name. This was the baroque era, and who knows what else was lost to that interminable mist. In the end, those who could recall his name, a handful of music historians, remembered him as a somewhat eccentric cleric and a freakishly good violinist who, along with his exquisite music-almost 800 works of incomparable beauty-had somehow vanished into the mists of time. In his time, he was a cult figure who lived in a mansion overlooking Venice’s Grand Canal, which is pretty swanky for a musician. One tourist pamphlet from that time actually listed him as “one of the great things to see while in Venice.” He was a virtuoso violinist who played with an almost pyrotechnical fervor. Vivaldi wrote some of the most beautiful, passionate, dramatic, and some even said “dangerous” music of the era. More often than not, there would be just one handwritten manuscript for each work of the great composers, and we are very lucky any survived at all. Just like the pop stars of today, those flames seldom burn for very long, and there were no recordings or radio stations back then to carry his name forward. While Vivaldi would die in poverty in 1741, he achieved great fame and success during his lifetime. But this Venetian, a contemporary of Bach and Handel, would eventually go on to surpass their fame-and double their record sales. This rock star of the baroque era, known as the “Red Priest,” would enjoy a meteoric rise, and then fade into obscurity. For an Italian, he was also remarkable in that he possessed a head of flaming red hair. Legend has it that composer Antonio Vivaldi was born during an earthquake.
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