YouSaid · the spoken record

Dr Hannah French

lines on the record: 66
first: 2025-11-23
most recent: 2025-11-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I've written a Baroque advent calendar, so perhaps I need to put that somewhere and then if I could just spend that 15 minutes going, it's okay. It's actually not yet Christmas. I don't have to be frantic. These are the dark days of anticipation and the anticipation is so good.”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“ten, fifteen minutes a day to just have an appointment with a piece of music. And the benefits that I found of doing that are just manifold. unintentionally you breathe deeper. You just have a reset moment. It is a mindful moment in the best way. And I'm not advocating anything in particular to do except set aside 15 minutes and listen to a piece of music because the number of times that we might say, oh, I had to pull the car over just to hear the end of that. Or I had to just stop folding the washing and listen to what was on the radio at that particular moment. If we can create more of those moments in our day, then the chances are we did have a little reset and it did make us think differently about our day and how we went about things as a result of it. And so I... I would heartily recommend that tea.”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Christmas music going, maybe lose the words, but there are Christmas concertos, all that kind of stuff that can fill certainly early January. So yes, these are the things that I would really recommend that we just build into our year. And it's whether you have this on while you're cooking or while you're driving or whether you actually take”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“know why then you hear it differently. So I think that's the case with this too. Come winter, well Christmas. And I have a real bone to pick with Christmas. I have a real bone to pick with Christmas Well, the thing is, I absolutely love Advent. But Advent is not Christmas. And commercially and culturally, our Christmas is Advent. And then I knew people who take down the Christmas tree on boxing day. That's the second day of Christmas. So, you know, for my money, I would have Advent music all the way up to Christmas Eve. Then I would light the lights and put all of the really Christmasy stuff on the tree. And then you get the 12 days of Christmas. You get epiphany. And then, yeah, lose all of the, really Christmas. I mean, I'm not saying sing, oh, come all you faithful all the way to February, but Candlemass, the 2nd of February, if you leave up your tree, take off all of the really Christmas here, but just leave the little lights on, then that glow in the corner of your house keeps you going through January, famous for being, you know, 372 days long. And then it doesn't feel that long and you can keep music.”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Beautiful rose bushes over here. There are very evocative and of a hot summer's evening. Autumn so much great music for autumn and so many great connotations with the earth and the key of G minor, which actually isn't the key that Vivaldi writes in for that season, but was another key that was associated with that. But, you know, when I'm laid in earth is written in G minor, harpsichord concertos by Vilamina of Prussia, who sadly died in autumn and has a monument to friendship built for her in autumn by Frederick the Great. There are just stories to be told and I think that's part of the key to seasonal listening is telling these stories at the same time as hearing the music because that's basically what I've ended up doing with this. And yes, the music is about the season, but when you”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“as summer spectacular on the river Thames, probably the best musical cruise that's ever been in history. You know, things like that that were so flexible that you could have while you were eating or while you were traveling or as he got off the boat and a small moment by some.”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, this is the last hurrah in the book. So I recommend music that I've listened to throughout this year as well because, I mean, hang on heart, I haven't just listened to the four seasons in these four quarters. I know. Can you believe it? There were other things too. And actually, you know, whether it's going to Versailles in spring for the very first celebrations that King Louis XIV had when he moved his court there and Lily's music that was on the theme of the four seasons in May 1664, like this is fantastic music to listen to in spring that just captures that optimism, that grandeur, all of those ideas of awakening that we hear in the four seasons come summer, let's pick something like the water music, handles water music.”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hear them now, and at whatever time of the year you hear them, I now have images in my mind of the season that's fresh at any given point. And then the others are bottled, their memories and things that I can then suddenly feel very viscerally. I'm not going to forget being absolutely drenched in mantua. I mean, really drenched. I'd say three times one day. And we were talking all the way through. I had every item of clothing that I'd taken with me on that trip was drying on a radiator in my hotel room. That doesn't go away when you think about the rain in winter that soaks you to the skin. You know, it really is that. And the cobbles, oh my goodness, the cobbles in Mantura, trying to get a wheelchair across those cobbles when they're soaking wet and your hands are slipping and you're like, oh, okay, this is grim. This is grim.”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you know, you get the artichokes in spring and then in summer it's the mozzarella and the tomatoes ripened under the sun. And in autumn, the earthiness of the mushrooms and in winter the things from the larder, so the preserved meat. So I suppose if you were to have a pizza now, and I think if I was to have one in whichever season I'd want it in, I'd want that big.”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“thinking Do I really want the whole year on a plate? Because now I've experienced it in its own season and just taken time to breathe the air and to understand how it works. Do I really want to have that kind of whiplash of two and a half minutes of each movement in one evening? And that's when I went to talk to Angela Clutton, the great food writer who is fascinated by seasonality. She writes brilliantly about seasonality. And I said to her, well, how do I reconcile this now? And she said, well, see it this way, that the four seasons is on a plate entirely unseasonal. But you can bottle or pickle or preserve all of the elements of it. And I mean, it was the Neapolitans who came up with the idea of a four seasons pizza and at the port of Naples they put loads of seafood on it in whichever season on the rest of it. But now it is quite stylized.”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well I do now I don't think I did before I think I always thought I think I was always just jealous that I never got to play it I think that was the thing as a flutist like oh I bet this is really fun And of course you could play arrangements and all that kind of stuff, but I didn't. And I suppose I've always had it slightly at arm's length. And now my family and I have had it very, very close to home for quite a long time. So I do feel a lot more connected with it. And at the end of the process, I had to put it all back together again. And I got very used to listening endlessly to whichever season in whichever season. And then when it came to putting it back and thinking, well, I'm going to have to hear this all on one night. Do I really want to hear it all on one night? And then it brought in those analogies with things like the pizza.”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Take Vivaldi's four seasons as inspiration. That's what they can tap into. When Ayana Witter Johnson takes winter as her inspiration for Black Star March and capturing the thoughts and the imaginations and the experiences of her Caribbean heritage, then she's drawing on different scenes. She paints different pictures, but that emotion of joy and relief, but also of fear and all those kinds of things are still absolutely embedded in the music.”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. Well, I think that although the way that nature challenged Vivaldi's audiences versus our audiences today is vastly different, The fear of not being able to feed your family. The fear of crops changing and having to be changed. That fear is still deeply rooted in our society. It's just that it has developed with technology and with ideas and with time. I suppose that the dangers of winter in Vivaldi's Venice, the lagoon is very, very unlikely to ever freeze over again. The canals may well, of course, and that wouldn't be surprising, but for the entire 50 square kilometers of deep brackish water to freeze again just seems very, very unlikely. But the fear that Venetians have now of rising tides of Aqua Alta, you know, of erosion of Venice slipping into the lagoon. And I think that those are timeless emotions that when people then”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As the seasons change, as the environment changes, Vivaldi's four seasons could become even more nostalgic in a way for how things were. But at the same time, they're not nostalgic just for the peaceful bits. They are a reminder of how powerful nature is and how we have to respect it and learn to live with it and alongside it. There's no shying away from that reality. And I think that's perhaps, you know, if they weren't like that, they could be a bit twee. But they're not twee. They've got great depth and human understanding.”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“think that the fascination With articulating our place in nature is actually the key to understanding so many pieces of music. And I think that what Vivaldi does here is he makes it so explicit that he gives us the kind of the tools, the keys to recognize it and ourselves in other pieces of music. So in that respect, it comes back to where I started. It is a gateway. It's a gateway into his seasonality, but into other of listening seasonally too. It grounds us, it roots us, it's like It's like slowing down to appreciate what we have. And as the world is changing, and that sounds like such a massive platitude, but”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Airbrushing. The harshness is showing this dynamic way in which people exist in nature and how sometimes it is a celebration and other times it's just awful and you've just got to get through it. But then when you put autumn, the tricky one for me into that, you actually get quite a lot of relief in autumn. And that kind of resolution. And actually then when they do have a successful harvest and things are going to be okay, like, oh yeah, that is why that's wound into the music and why on its own. Is there really much depth to this? But there is when you put it back into context.”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The stylized fashions of the day to the actual people. And she did incredible self-portraits through each of the four seasons. And the one in winter is of her as an old person. And that, I think, was quite inspirational for me in terms of seeing Vivaldi in this book through the four seasons of his own life. And when I came across Rosalba showing herself through her seasons and come winter, yes, an old woman, you can see the macular degeneration in her eyes. She's got a kind of funny dimple in her chin and she's got her lips. But also she has a real twinkle and she's wearing furs and she's got pearls and she's a confident woman. But she does also look a little bit like, I don't know, your Auntie Joan, who's not a real auntie who lives three doors down. It's that kind of realism. And I think that is exactly what you see with Vivaldi in the four seasons. There's a reality to it that's not.”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it went very well for her. But the thing with these pastels is that they are quite whimsical. They're very, very real. And the faces that you see, some of them are very beautiful, but they also have faces that could look like somebody you know somehow. She sees past.”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You wouldn't say harmonious, but I would say dynamic and very real. Know the idea that the four seasons are not just Pastoral allegories or romanticized views of each season becomes very, very real for Vivaldi. You know, he had a neighbor in Venice. It was an artist called Rosalba Carriera. And this is the cool thing about this book. I mean, you write a book about a dead white man and you think, oh, does the world need, does the world need another recording of Vivaldi's four season? Does the world need a book about Vivaldi's four seasons? But actually, he led me to some really interesting women. And Rosalba Carriera was one of them. She was an artist in Venice. And she really, amongst other things, got into pastels and pastel portraits, which was really savvy because if you were on the grand tour and you wanted your portrait doing in oil, then great. Venice was a really good place to do it. But it would take a really long time. A pastel could be completed best part of a week. So she got into this.”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“stock and there are no birds there's no wildlife it is just an entirely frozen world and one in which people are testing the ice seeing how far they can go falling it's it's not fun and games the fun and games are there but they are right at the end of the concerto just as carnival comes Towards the end of winter and brings that joy that is so badly needed at that time of year.”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The idea that winter starts with this entirely frozen landscape isn't yes it's skating season it's oh my goodness we're completely cut off Nothing that we can do about this, you're trapped in ice. And for someone like Vivaldi, who potentially wasn't very mobile, who suffered with a tight chest, yes, that could be horrific in summer, but also, I mean, we all know that when the weather suddenly turns and you go out on the school run at 8 o'clock in the morning, you cough because it's cold suddenly in your lungs. You know, you imagine what that is like in unheated houses and you don't know how long it's going to be. And it can be months. And so these great winters, as they were called, that happened more frequently than we'd like to think about right now in what we now know as the Little Ice Age were a terrifying time. So winter to begin with.”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Winter is interesting because I think it's the one concerto where you can really feel the influence of Venice rather than Mantua. Only a couple of years. If we decide, if you come with me on the four seasons being written in 1719, only a few years before, the entire Venetian lagoon had frozen. So we're not talking about the canals. They would freeze most years in Vivaldi's lifetime. I mean, the entire lagoon completely frozen. It happened in 1709. It happened again in 1716. And for Vivaldi and his family, This along with all the other residents of Venice would have been terrifying. I mean, tens of thousands of people perished because they couldn't get food, they couldn't get fuel to light fires. They were completely cut off from the mainland. And it was a long time before they realized that horses and carriages or carts could actually be held by the ice and they could get support.”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I find much more persuasive. I think often in brought music, say, oh, it just gets played faster and faster. And, you know, that doesn't necessarily make it more exciting. And I entirely agree with that. But I do think that Vivaldi probably didn't ride a horse. So his idea of how quickly a horse moves. And you can't really match that quite with the music to make it do that thing. You've got to find where its sweet spot lies.”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Why that's hard to really feel as emotively as you want to feel it. And that's bound up in tempos and articulation and ornaments and suspense and drama and even a little bit of pantomime here and there. It's got to be the right balance of those things. Because, you know, the four seasons, they do suffer from being played a lot and not every performance is going to move you. And so that was another big part of the book I wanted to talk to people who'd performed it in a whole range of different ways and considered the early recordings and the development of different interpretations to see how and why we respond to the music in the way that we do it at different times. I mean different eras if you like and I think that at the moment recent recordings especially of this last movement of auto”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Aripiano group of a band who would come back and rally everything so it holds it together. And then by the time you get to the last movement, the hunt, I mean, that is a really different feel, I think, to everything else in the four seasons. It's the only moment where we come across death. You know, the quarry, the stag perhaps has that real touching moment where its spirit lifts and the hunt pauses for a while before moving off again. It's done very poignantly. I find it a really difficult movement. I find it probably the cheesiest and the hardest to take seriously, even though it's perhaps the most poignant. And I really grappled with that and I talked to various musicians. Those interviews are captured in the book to try and work out.”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Going, oh, look what I could play. Oh, I'd have fallen over again, needs something to do that against. Otherwise, the whole thing would fall apart. So that really plays into the idea of the violin concerto and the idea that you'd have”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“While the first movement, yes, he challenges the soloists to go to great lengths, and actually when you talk to I'm not a violinist, but when you talk to violinists as soloists, they say when you get to that point, it is really difficult to pull off in a concert because summer is exhausting. You know, this is a big play, especially if you're just doing it back to back. And so, yeah, you do have to completely act drunk, but your cast of characters have to decide who's holding it together at any given point. And actually, Autumn is different to the others in a way in that the tunes are quite simple. They're quite straightforward. They're real toe tapping moments. There's nothing really to trip you up. And especially in that first moment, you need something like that. You have to have a chorus of people who are all cheersing their glasses together to keep it together because the soloist, when he's slipping and sliding around and...”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As a cleric, he would have had access to some really fine wines, and certainly visiting dignitaries would have plied him with their fine wines as well. So yeah, there's that side of it. And then, you know, the effects of that in the second movement where everyone's intoxicated and dreaming all sorts of dreams, yeah, I think that the harvest is a really Integral part of that time of year, whether you're out in the fields or you're watching it being brought into the markets. And actually the Duke of Palace in Mantua is a huge, it's a vast complex and it's got gardens within it. So there are vines hanging around it. I mean it's in the corridors in the art but it's also in these little gardens. So he could have experienced quite a lot of that harvest look and feel and smell without even leaving the palace walls.”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Initially, a lot of drunkenness And I was in Mantua on market day, and there was quite a lot of drunkenness there all around the square, the same square where Market would have been in Vivaldi's time. And yeah, the big question really, I suppose, is, is Vivaldi drunk? Is he the drunk soloist? I mean, you really have to hand it up to make it work. Is it him? Is he making fun of a courtier? Has he seen people around the marketplace with all the produce trying the first of the new wines and feeling the effects of that? Could he not take drink himself? So I was really fascinated in the ways that Vivaldi had interacted with wine. And I have a great friend who lives in New York, who is a wine historian, and we try to work out what would have been in Vivaldi's wine cellar. In Venice and also in Mantua, because as”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The goddess of marriage. And so, well, she was the goddess of fruit trees, but she symbolized marriage because Vertumnus was her partner and what I'm trying to say is it's bound up in this idea of the four seasons at weddings. So by the time you start putting all these things together, there's nothing for certain, but I feel all the ingredients are there in Mantua.”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The idea that he had heard prototype versions of the four seasons is very real because in the dedication, Vivaldi writes, with some embarrassment that there'd been such a delay before these had actually been published. And actually Mortzina probably given him a grant to help have them published. So he was embarrassed on both fronts that he'd seen them earlier. He'd probably been paid for them. And that he said, they'll be quite transformed from when you last heard them. So it does make me think, right, okay, so perhaps in the first place they were inspired by these frescoes, by this setting, by this idea of writing for a wedding. Because one of the precedents for the four seasons is an opera called Pomona in which the four seasons are in competition as to which one is the best. And eventually Jupiter has to decide and he rules in favour of autumn and Pomona because she will...”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Prince Philip really loved spectacle, so it would have married spectacle with the kind of literary side of things in music, potentially then played in a concert hall dedicated to the months with frescoes of the four seasons, the meeting of nature and high art. And it's just those kinds of things that come together because we do know about the only thing we really know for certain is that the four seasons were published in 1725, which is a long time after this event. But in the dedication to it, she dedicates to Count Mozin, who was a member of the aristocracy in Prague, who had definitely visited Mantua quite likely in that year, whether he was going to be at the wedding or not is a total different matter, and we certainly don't have guest lists.”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Again, and it was all intended for 1719, and then it didn't happen. And we don't really know why it didn't happen, but it got a long way, like the date was set and it was all ready to happen. And some think that Vienna got nervous that she would make claim to Mantua and she was a headstrong woman. And other people say that she had illegitimate children in Florence and they, you know, a little bit like Strozzi. I see her in that kind of figure, Barbara Strotzi, that she had her own mind, possibly had her own children, but they were going to tarnish her reputation so that she wouldn't be suitable to marry Prince Philip. Either way, it didn't happen. But if it had happened, the four seasons would have been a really interesting thing in that, you know, Vivaldi is starting to think much more poetically and literally about it.”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I genuinely was getting hot and my heart was racing. I'm like, hang on a minute, could this be it? Because It does line up. It also lines up to be written in 1719 because Prince Philip was going to marry Eleanora de Guestala, who had been born princess of the Gonzagas in Manchu. And she had been married off to a Medici, packed off to Florence. Not a very happy marriage. He was lawful a lot older than her. She clearly just did her best to avoid him until she was widowed, and then she was having a very jolly time in Florence, really heading up lots of literary, well, academias in a way. And she had this fabulous circle of poets and writers. And she was a good match. I mean, frankly, the kind of political machinations of tying families together, she was a bit of a pawn in that. But had she married Philip, it would have really secured the Gonzaga line back in Manchuria.”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People take selfies on it with the lake behind them and it's all terribly lovely. And then they hurry inside to see the impressive frescoes. But when you get onto that loggia with the concert hall of the months behind you and you turn around, the walls are really worn by the weather because it's straight onto the elements. But if you look up in the cornices of the roof, there are four frescoes of the four seasons. And it was one of those moments where you go, okay, okay. Now, for whatever reason and for whoever he wrote these, I believe he wrote them in Mantua. And you're suddenly at this point where hi art meets nature with four frescoes of the four seasons at a place where you could play them. And it just feels like things fall into place. And that for me was the real lesson in going back to where you really think something was written and just, well, literally opening your eyes and looking up.”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A, well, a concert hall. It's called the Hall of Months. And all around it there are stuccoes of the months of the year and depictions of passing time day to night, all that kind of stuff. I'm like, wow, this is something. And they said, yeah, yeah, they used to perform chamber music in here. And I'm like, wow, really cool acoustic for this. And I'll go through this and I think, okay. So out of these windows, you can see. Arable land. And here we've got this kind of height of art and great taste in time and the passing of time through the year and the months. And then at the end of that long, thin concert hall area, it had been a balcony, but they bricked it up in the 16th century and made it into this kind of space. At the end of it, there's a loggier, a kind of portico that looks out onto the lake. It's called Eleonora's Lodger.”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and there were so many little, I use a wheelchair, so many little stairlifts and tight doorways and ramps. And yeah, anyway, we got there. And it's in the apartment of Troy. And there is a wonderful walkway that you can roll down to get there. And then the Pumptatro Troy has these incredible Romano frescoes. They're beautiful. At Vivaldi's time, that area of the palace wasn't lived in Prince Philip of Hesse Darmstadt had been installed there. And they were almost like, it was like a hermit crab palace. He just chose which bits they were going to do up. And part of having Vivaldi there was to restore the former Gonzaga glory and make Mantua brilliant. And so that part of the palace would have been used for entertaining and people would want to go and see those frescoes. So we headed down there, went in there, great. On the side of it, there is...”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The four seasons are ubiquitous, but there isn't anywhere in Venice that you can go and sit and go, ah, yes, look, fountains or archways or buildings, or there's no obvious four seasons there. And I thought it's got to be somewhere. And I went to the Duke of Palace in Mantua, and Stefanola Castle is the director there. And he really got into this. We went on a bit of a romp around the palace looking for places that he could have performed the four seasons, the likely candidates, the likely spaces. And he eventually got called away and he said, look, there's one last place I think you should go to. And it's about the furthest you can get. in the palace.”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that the notion of going back to where somebody wrote something is very romantic. And it's a bit rosy-tinted spectacles and it's all very lovely, but that was a long time ago. And I think part of what I wanted to learn by going back, you know, there are buildings that acoustics don't change in. And there are views that you know if you squint a little bit and take out some pythons in a roundabout or something, that is what they saw. But I suppose the most telling thing was in Mantua because”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That restriction and that effect of it. And it can be called anniversary asthma, something that comes back every summer. I suppose aligned with hay fever, but certainly within a real discomfort of that time of the year. And so I wanted to explore that. And I did with Andrew Bush, who's a pediatric respologist at Imperial College. And he was really helpful. We tried to give Vivaldia a historical consultation. See how that would go but it does make you think about him and that experience of summer. And then the last movement is the inevitable. The winds arrive and they are unrelenting until there is a final cry from the shepherd that this really is all that can be done and his crops are spoiled. There's no happy ending. This is not ice creams in the afternoon and ice apperal spritz in a cobbled courtyard in a North Italian town.”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Before a sudden rumble of thunder, and a horrible silence, and then it takes up again. And the more you live with that, the more you think, wow, this is somebody who is potentially struggling to breathe, who has to keep going, who's being taken by surprise by the weather, who's really suffering in the humidity. I mean, Mantua was awful in the summer. These swamps and the lakes around it, Monteverdi had suffered before, and his dad was an apothecary and a surgeon. And it was one of the factors that moved Monteverdi from Mantua to Venice. And I wonder whether Vivaldi really suffered in Venice with that humidity. There's also something in Thunder and Lightning in that when lightning strikes, it splits the grain and these tiny little particles get into the air. And anybody who doesn't even have asthma can start to”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's various research that's going on at the moment. Giuseppe Gulo is a Vivaldi scholar who's doing incredible research into Eisenmenger syndrome, which actually is a pulmonary disorder, which Vivaldi may well have had. And then the classic thing is that he had asthma. And I'm not convinced in any direction really. The asthmatic thing, well, he certainly had a tight chest and asthma presents in lots of different ways. Rumbles with thunder, and between those thunderous rumbles, you get this long, high, tight melody line that runs for any length of time.”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The fear that is wound into the first movement you see through the birds, through his choice of birds and their characters as we've come to. The second movement I find particularly fascinating and really telling for Vivaldi as a man and his experience of summer. I think it's something akin to an asthma attack. Now we don't know exactly what was wrong with Vivaldi, but we do know that by the end of his life, he wasn't able to leave the house unless he got in a gondola or a carriage. He couldn't walk. He suffered with a tight chest and clearly found it hard to breathe at times. And so when you have that on the one hand, and on the other this dazzling virtuoso who played incredible concertos in the intervals of his operas and travelled around all over the place, how do you... Marry up those two things. And so”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The Valdi summer is heading in a straight line for one of the worst possible storms that could hit northern Italy in that period. All the other concertos change key for the middle movement at least. And this one doesn't. So there's just no deviation. There's no sheltering. There's no escape from what is inevitably going to happen. Although it's the plight of a shepadora farmer, an arable worker, at this time, if your crops failed, your family didn't eat. You couldn't plant the crops for the next year either. Your town would suffer the landowner who you paid your taxes to wouldn't get his revenue. He wouldn't be able to put it into other things as well. You can end up with social unrest. It's all sorts of implications from starvation if your crops don't come good. And so that's a very real element of it.”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Suffering and then some joy on the end is about all of those experiences that you might have throughout the year. And I think that's where it's really embedded. And it's not just in the poetry and it's not just in the performance, but it's in the depth of the music, even from the keys that he uses, whether it's major keys when nature is benign in spring or in autumn, or minor keys where it's really malignantly offensive in summer and winter.”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Returning to the Pier Time in Venice have brought back his postcards from Manchuria and said, Hey, four of you, you can take on the personalities of each of these. But I think what he does with the four seasons is taps into a very Eighteenth century idea of music becoming much more psychological. So before Vivaldi, depictions of the full seasons were much more allegorical and they were poetic, but they would perhaps be of a scene or you'd get a moment in an opera that was all chilly for winter or that kind of thing. But what he does is he puts humanity right in there. So it's about fear and relief.”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think you're right. The four seasons are a really universal theme and they're definitely there well before Vivaldi in music, let alone in art and architecture and fountains at Versailles or whatever that might be. So I think that striking on that as potential inspiration for something that became so much more than just a title is really crucial. And I think what he did that others hadn't before I can't find any violin concertos before these that really deal so specifically, so comprehensively, so poetically with the four seasons and giving it to a narrator, to a single person to kind of lead his cast of characters and effects, is a really striking thing. It's something that he would absolutely have done himself, but could perhaps when written.”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From this time, and I think there are a couple of occasions in which they could have been played in Mantua that really tie into explaining perhaps where, when or why he wrote them.”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of production. So the four seasons come from this kind of meeting of high art and nature and something that he would absolutely have seen in Mantua, whether he was out in the fields or not. And I don't believe he was because I think he was actually quite a disabled man. That's something that definitely emerged out of my research we can come back to that. But from the Ducal Palace had an incredible view out across the lakes that surround Mantuan onto the land beyond it. And I think it's this, yeah, as I say, this meeting of spectacle and literature poetry and placing musicians orchestral musicians center stage, giving them roles that perhaps they might have had in an opera and imagining those musicians on stage rather than in the pit. So I think that”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The idea of him watching the grape harvest and seeing the storms whipping through the farmland really doesn't carry much with Venice. But in 1718 he took up a court position in Mantua and it's the only time he really took a paid court position in his life. He was very much tied to the pieta and then as an opera composer and later impresario. But this was a very specific time. And he arrived there, probably looking very much like a slightly eccentric cleric. But going there to take up a very secular post with this incredible gift of 23 musicians in a band who could do all sorts. And he wasn't in charge of opera when he arrived, but he soon was after that and he took with him set designers and he was fascinated in all the elements.”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT