YMMV / Antonio Vivaldi

• First Installment Wins: The Four Seasons were originally published as the first four Violin Concerti in a set of twelve, his Op. 8, Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione (The Contest Between Harmony and Invention). Almost everybody has heard of those first four concerti even if they can't name them, but almost nobody outside of classical music enthusiasts know of the very existence of the latter eight.
  • Of The Four Seasons themselves, the first movement of the first season, Spring, is the most well-known.
• Once Original, Now Common: Audiences in the 1720s would have heard The Four Seasons as shockingly original and innovative. The music's rigorous passion was a stark contrast to the more gentle-sounding music of Vivaldi's predecessor, Arcangelo Corelli who had pioneered the violin, and the music was written to invoke specific imagery, so The Four Seasons can claim to be programme music before the term was coined around the time of Franz Liszt a century later. Since the rediscovery of Vivaldi in The '40s, however, The Four Seasons have been performed and recorded so often that a vocal group of people automatically tune out because they've already heard the music so many times before, and even fans can have difficulty appreciating just how original The Four Seasons were for the time.
• Values Dissonance: Nowadays, the joyful dance-like finale of L'autunno (Autumn)—the third concerto of The Four Seasons—can be very uncomfortable to listen to when you realize that the music's accompanying sonnet reveals it's about hunting wildlife for pleasure. In Vivaldi's time, many people saw nothing wrong with hunting and killing wildlife for pleasure and the activity was popular, but nowadays increased awareness of endangered species means hunting for pleasure instead of survival would be seen as immoral at best and illegal at worst.

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