Vivaldi, Divina Stella

If our contemporary era is prodigious in crises and threats, the decade in which Vivaldi composed the works on our program has nothing to envy the present day. Around the 1720s, the dark events did not yet allow Vivaldi's century to be described as an "Age of Enlightenment." The upheavals of the War of the Spanish Succession—a veritable bloodbath on a European scale—the still numerous epidemics of plague and smallpox, and the violence orchestrated by various tyrannies, made it a time when anxiety lurked surreptitiously.

Vivaldi's motets, composed mostly for the daughters of the Pietà—angels of light on earth—are the musical embodiment of these hopes. Storms and gusts of sound, present in abundance in these lyrical miniatures, metaphors for the turbulence that overwhelms Europe, precede the appearance of a comforting light. For, in the convulsions of restless nature, the Divina Stella already shines , the divine star that illuminates humanity. This chiaroscuro that inhabits the works in our selection, vibrant and theatrical, teaches us patience and confidence in the coming of better days, where music will guide restless souls.