The Red Priest and the Girls Behind the Grille

By the time it was built — designed by Giorgio Massari, between 1745 and 1760 — the composer had been dead for years. It’s one of those small, beautiful ironies that music history is full of: the place most bound to his name is one he never once set foot in.

To understand why, you have to go back. The church stands beside the Ospedale della Pietà — and the word “hospital” misleads here: it housed not the sick but abandoned children, above all girls. Venice had four such institutions — the Pietà, the Mendicanti, the Incurabili and the Derelitti — immensely powerful, and each one had its own orchestra.

Newborns were left through a wheel in the wall: no family, no name. The Pietà raised them and taught them singing, instruments, music theory. The finest of them, the figlie di coro, played for audiences who travelled from Vienna, Paris and London — but always hidden behind grilles. They could not be seen. They could only be heard.

In 1703, a young red-haired priest arrives at the Pietà. They will call him the Red Priest. He is twenty-five, his job is to teach violin, and his name is Antonio Vivaldi.

He begins writing music for these particular girls: he knows their names, knows which one has the fastest hand and which the finest ear. Over nearly forty years he will sign more than five hundred concertos — and masterpieces like the Gloria and the oratorio Juditha Triumphans, written right there, for them.

But Vivaldi’s true legacy isn’t only the beauty of that music. It’s a form. The solo concerto already existed as a raw idea; with him it became precise architecture — one voice against all the others. The soloist who emerges, challenges, converses, then folds back in. That structure is still here — through Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, all the way to jazz. Every time an instrument breaks from the orchestra and speaks, that voice comes from him.

The end of his life, though, is bitter. Vivaldi dies in Vienna in 1741, poor and forgotten. His manuscripts scatter, split into two halves, and vanish from circulation for nearly two centuries — until a rediscovery in Turin, in the late 1920s, restores him to his place as one of the most-played composers in the world.

A curiosity. Look up at the ceiling of the Pietà church, at Giambattista Tiepolo’s fresco (The Triumph of Faith, 1754–1755). Among a crowd of angels, singers and musicians, recent studies have spotted a half-face of a red-haired man: the only one not playing and not singing, his gaze turned downward, toward us. There’s no certainty — the fresco was painted thirteen years after his death — but it’s hard not to think of Antonio Vivaldi.

• • •

And then there’s David

Fast-forward three hundred years, and that single voice has a name this community knows by heart. What Vivaldi invented — the soloist who steps out of the orchestra, one voice against all the others — is precisely what David Garrett has built a whole life around. Strip away the arenas, the crossover, the lights, and the essence is pure Vivaldi: a violin that breaks from the ensemble, challenges it, sings over it, and pulls every ear in the room toward a single line. Garrett doesn’t merely play the soloist’s repertoire — he is the soloist Vivaldi first sketched, three centuries on.

And Vivaldi has never left his side. He was there at the very start of Garrett’s crossover adventure — the finale of “Summer” on his international debut, where, by his own account, he kept the original structure but gave it the energy of rock. He returned in 2010 on Rock Symphonies, where “Vivaldi vs Vertigo” sets the storm-opening of the “Winter” concerto head-to-head with U2. And he came back in full sincerity on the 2022 classical album Iconic, recording the tender central Largo of that same “Winter” — part of his mission to bring the great violin showpieces back to life. It’s telling that across two decades and two musical identities — the rock showman and the classical purist — the one composer who keeps resurfacing is the Red Priest.

Then there’s the live “Summer.” At the Teatro Antico di Taormina (18 June 2023), beneath Mount Etna, with the Orchestra del Teatro Vittorio Emanuele di Messina under Gianna Fratta, Garrett’s Vivaldi “Summer” became three minutes of pure lightning — a soloist alone against a whole orchestra, exactly as Vivaldi conceived it, filmed and flung around the world.

Story discovered thanks to the wonderful Reel by @musicaviaggiando — Elisa Drei & Marco Forti.