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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“Of Ivaldi's Venice is sort of important to them, but the image that we have of Vivaldi, working as he did in the Pietar. Don't really line up with the four seasons. There's actually no evidence that he performed it there and with the women of the theatre. I think he probably did, but I don't think that it's central to the development of the concertos. I think they really come from Mantua. There are various reasons for that. The main one, well, one of the main ones that people have cited before is that they're quite rural. So it's a lot about farming and the birds. And Venice is a busy, thriving port and where Valdivi. And the pieta on the Grand Canal, and then a couple of stops up on a vaporetto, you get to the theatre that he worked at most often, San Angelo.”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Be strong because the first thing it does is murders all the other chicks or smashes the eggs, becomes the prime child, and the bird takes it on until it fledges and goes it is the most horrific process. It's really brutal. But the more I learn about this kind of thing, the more the music made sense and the more, you know, I don't suppose that Vivaldi was a really keen birder, but these were the birds that they heard. They didn't have to go to a nature reserve to experience them. These were the birds that were around town in Venice and Manchur in his day. And some of them they would have known about cuckoos, certainly.”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“are really critical to the music so the cuckoo being a prime example of the most hideous murderous horrible horrible bird this whole idea of the soft cooing cuckoo it's just ridiculous um well it's not that's what we hear but not what vivaldi hears and not what he writes because this kind of doom laden storm approaching awfulness of summer is completely encapsulated in the female cry of a cuckoo and she has time to sing lots of female birds don't sing she has time to sing because she completely outsources all of the childcare so she lays her egg in another unassuming bird's nest and that bird takes on the egg the egg catches the fetus if that's what we call an unborn bird spins much faster in the egg than any other bird because it has to”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Here en masse. And the important thing is that they arrive and that they sing and that there's a little storm, but then they sing again afterwards because everything's really okay. So that's the main message. But I went birding with Tom McKinney, weekday breakfast presenter who is mad for birds and has incredible knowledge and the most wonderful ears. Anyway, we went birding on a very, very, very wet late spring day. And I believe we identified what they are between larks and nightingales. And to do with the call and the specific way that Vivaldi writes in the score and also the activity and the responses that they have. Yeah, it was fascinating. But then comes summer, Vivaldi names the birds so you get the cuckoo, you get the goldfinch, and you get this idea that the characters of the birds”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What they're really important, they're important when they're there, and it's really telling when they disappear. So primarily in spring and summer. And in spring, he doesn't name them. So the four seasons, some people would be very, very familiar with them. Some people are just learning now that they come with poetry, with sonnets, and that Vivaldi ascribed very specific effects in the music with the sonnets. He aligned them really closely. And in spring, he just talks about the birds, the arrival of the birds, their singing their hearts out. But when you look at the music, you look at the score, you can see that there are various levels, depths, if you like, of birds. It's like sitting in a bird hide and hearing Ah, there's the ones up there, there's some in the middle, or the sum at ground level. And so I really wanted to try and find out who the springbird characters were because he doesn't name them there.”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Changed in all this time and go to a service and just see if I could just live those moments and see what came of it. So it was a bit of an experiment, but I knew that I wanted to articulate the music in a certain way and ask questions of it that I would only, you know, you can only really go bird watching and hear those birds at that time of year because that's when they're there. So it did dictate the agenda. And I'm really glad that that was the process. There was then editing after that. But it was a year of writing.”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was really clear it emerged quite early on that the best way to do this was to write them in track, in step with the year. So I gave myself a year to write the initial manuscript. And I lined up people to talk to at very specific moments. Would you talk to me about this? Yeah, yeah. But will you do it in May or will you do it in October? Because that's when I really need to meet you. And actually, just be very present. Feel what's going on in the weather and the feel and what we're wearing and how we interact at those times of the year. And then there were festivals and specific events in northern Italy that Vivaldi would have experienced. I wanted to be there at those moments to taste the dishes that he would have tasted because they have.”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“them, and these women and women they were because they stayed some until their 90s. They lived in the PHR. So this wasn't an orchestra of children. It was an orchestra of women of all ages, but their abilities, I believe, were pretty phenomenal. Vivaldi headed up for many decades this all-female professional standard ensemble of players and singers at the Pieta.”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a place where babies were left in a kind of drawer in a wall. And children grew up and then stayed. And they were separated between boys and girls that in short the girls took two different directions. They would either take up embroidery and cooking and cleaning and the kind of domestic side of the institution. Or they went into music. And music for them was an incredible gift. It would actually inform their identities. They would take on a surname based on the instrument that they played or the voice part that they had. And Vivaldi came in to teach them. And clearly, whatever misgivings we may have about his managerial skills, his organizational skills, he comes across as quite a chaotic person with quite a difficult character at times. He clearly insists.”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Antonio Vivaldi was born in Venice in 1678. He grew up to be known as the Red Priest. He initially trained to work in the church, but then he relinquished that in favor of his music career, which had started young because his father had been a barber and then got a gig as a violinist at St Mark's Basilica. And they would play together. They were one of the sights on the Grand Tour, you know, come to Venice, have your portrait painted, visit these frescoes and make sure you hear this pair of incredible flame-headed virtuoso violinists. So Vivaldi was well known as a violinist, but in 1703, he got a job at the Pietas. And the Pietas For unwanted children”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Between seventeen eighteen, seventeen twenty, in Mantua, about forty serenadas, loads of concertos, he really could let his imagination run wild.”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With no doubt of his virtuosic abilities. He really wanted to be an impresario, but he wasn't really going to get that far in Venice. So Manchu in a way was a sidestep in order to move up the career ladder. And in Mantua, he would have all of these experiences that he could then bring back and get the job that he really wanted to. So he took up this role. He would arrive as quite a perhaps eccentric looking cleric about to take up a post of secular music and also eventually take on opera there, which was the key to then going back and getting that kind of gig in Venice. But he was in charge of 23 musicians, no small band, and really had quite a lot of artistic freedom. And that's why certainly Serenadas and operas, he wrote four operas.”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Vivaldi wasn't a spring chicken when he wrote the four seasons. He had spent many, many years in Venice to this point. He was actually 41 by the time he wrote them. So he had all sorts of experience performing, composing, teaching at the Pieter. Lots of things that informed the way that he would write and also a lot of life experience to write the human emotion, the human experience into the music. So he had been based in Venice. And in 1718, he took up a post in Mantua as a director of secular music, which actually when you think about it, it's quite a surprise move. In Venice, he had had all sorts of operatic aspirations. So his playing was without almost without compare.”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That you go to and you heard a particular opera there and you always go back, oh, it's September, it makes me feel of Don Giovanni or whatever it might be. Sometimes it's things that have become ingrained in our own experience, but it's really fascinating to pinpoint when composers wrote things and if there's anything in the air at the time. And that's why Vivaldi's four seasons was such a gift. But I thought, well, I tell you what, I'll start each chapter with that, and then that'll let us in. But the thing was that I asked the basic questions of the four seasons. When was it written? Who was it written for? Why was it written? And I couldn't answer any of those questions. So I set out to answer them. And before I knew it, that was the book.”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's anything you want it to be from the really blinking obvious to quite nuanced stuff. So whether it's that you listen to the Christmas oratorio on the days of which those six cantatas that make up that work were first performed. And then you have an experience of a work that's not just in one evening or curtailed to fit into one evening, but that spreads and sits down and gives you an impression of that experience over about three weeks. So whether it's that or whether it's music that was written for a particular occasion in a particular season that just makes sense to hear it, if you think, I suppose, about the times that we do listen seasonally, Christmas carols are the obvious one, but maybe it's music that you really love to hear at the proms or it's a festival.”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Seasonality About this idea of seasonal listening. And I have done, it still is. It came from radio and from presenting the breakfast show and music that's so specific to a day and a time that you just want to hear at that moment. And I thought, I think there's something in this. And the more I looked at it, the more I realized that Vivaldi's four seasons was the perfect gateway because, yeah, everyone knows the four seasons, right? And I thought this is a real invitation”
2025-11-23 · Intelligence Squared · Is Vivaldi Still the Soundtrack of the Seasons? With Dr Hannah French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT