la bouche be my lover acapella christmas

Raised as a violinist, Vivaldi probably wrote little or no church music until the second decade of the eighteenth century. It then became evident that his production of church music was substantial – over fifty works have survived, and the existence of many more is recorded – and that this music was varied, ambitious in form and expression, and on an artistic level at least equal to that of his concertos. The situation changed only when Vivaldi’s own huge working collection of manuscripts came to light and was acquired for the National Library in Turin. After all, several clerics among composers, Tartini being the most pertinent example, eschewed vocal music altogether. True he was a priest, and for that reason would have been familiar with the sacred repertoire and, one supposes, sympathetic to its aesthetic, but that in itself proves nothing. Almost no church music by him was known to have survived and, since he had never been maestro di cappella at any church, it was difficult to conceive of circumstances in which he would have been asked to provide such music in bulk. Before the 1920s, the suggestion that Vivaldi had composed a significant corpus of sacred vocal music would have seemed absurd.

La bouche be my lover acapella christmas