Antonio Vivaldi
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50 free Antonio Vivaldi trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Antonio Vivaldi wrote some of the most recognisable music on Earth, yet for nearly two centuries after his death almost nobody played it. The Red Priest of Venice was a virtuoso violinist, a teacher, an opera promoter and a tireless self-publisher, and his life had as many sudden turns as one of his concertos. This quiz follows the whole story: The Four Seasons and the scenes hidden inside it, the pupils who made his concertos famous, the stage works and church music, the patrons who lifted him up and the critics who mocked him, and the twentieth-century detective work that brought his scores back to light. It also covers how later musicians, film-makers and choreographers have borrowed from him. It is written for classical music fans, violin students and anyone who has ever hummed along to Spring without knowing who wrote it. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so a wrong guess still leaves you with a story worth repeating.
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Q 01Antonio Vivaldi, ordained in 1703, was nicknamed the Red Priest in Venice because of the colour of what?
His hair
His hair was red, a Vivaldi family trait, and it gave the young cleric a name that stuck for life. He kept the nickname even though he soon stopped saying public Mass.
Q 02The orchestra Vivaldi trained at Venice's Pietà drew visitors from across Europe, and its players were all what?
Female
Female musicians filled every seat, performing behind a metal grille that screened them from the audience. Most of them stayed at the Pietà for their entire lives.
Q 03Vivaldi taught music for decades at Venice's Ospedale della Pietà, which was what kind of institution?
An orphanage
An orphanage for abandoned children, the Pietà took in infants through a window only large enough for a baby. Vivaldi joined in 1703 as its master of violin.
Q 04Hoping for an emperor's patronage, Vivaldi left Venice late in life and died poor in 1741 in which city?
Vienna
Vienna was meant to be a fresh start, but the emperor died soon after Vivaldi arrived. Left without a patron or a steady income, he died within a year and was buried in a simple grave.
Q 05Which composer arranged ten of Vivaldi's concertos for keyboard, including one reworked for four harpsichords?
Johann Sebastian Bach
Johann Sebastian Bach learned from Vivaldi by transcribing him, turning six concertos into solo keyboard pieces and three into organ works. The Italian style left a deep mark on his own music.
Q 06Vivaldi published each concerto of The Four Seasons alongside which kind of poem describing the scenes in the music?
A sonnet
A sonnet accompanies each season, and its author may have been Vivaldi himself. Each poem splits into three sections that match the three movements of its concerto.
Q 07Which violinist's 1989 recording of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons sold over three million copies with pop-style marketing?
Nigel Kennedy
Nigel Kennedy's album with the English Chamber Orchestra became one of the best-selling classical recordings ever. It was promoted like a pop release, with a single, billboards and TV adverts.
Q 08A crater named in 1976 after the composer Antonio Vivaldi lies on which body in the Solar System?
Mercury
Mercury has a crater called Vivaldi, a name approved by the International Astronomical Union. Its inner ring of peaks measures about half the width of the outer ring.
Q 09Giovanni Battista Vivaldi, who taught his son Antonio the violin, had worked in which trade before becoming a musician?
Barber
Barber was Giovanni Battista's first trade, before he turned professional violinist and helped found an association of Venetian musicians. He toured the city playing alongside young Antonio.
Q 10Vivaldi's own notes mark sleeping drunkards in the second movement of which concerto from The Four Seasons?
Autumn
Autumn carries Vivaldi's caption that the drunkards have fallen asleep, written over its second movement. Other captions in the score mark the languor of a hot day and a dog that will not stop barking.
Q 11Vivaldi's lifelong tightness of the chest, which kept him off wind instruments, is usually read as which condition?
Asthma
Asthma is the usual reading of the symptom Vivaldi called strettezza di petto. It never stopped him from mastering the violin, composing or travelling widely.
Q 12Which composer recomposed Vivaldi's The Four Seasons in 2012, discarding about three-quarters of the original material?
Max Richter
Max Richter kept only a quarter of Vivaldi's notes, then looped and phased them in his own minimalist style. The violinist Daniel Hope played the solo part on the first recording.
Q 13Which 1979 film features music from the first movement of Vivaldi's Mandolin Concerto in C major?
Kramer vs. Kramer
Q 21Vivaldi's breakthrough 1711 concerto set, dedicated to a Tuscan prince, was published under which Italian title?
L'estro armonico
L'estro armonico, Vivaldi's Opus 3, has been called perhaps the most influential set of instrumental music of the whole eighteenth century. It was the first time his concertos appeared in print.
Q 22Vivaldi's best-known sacred choral work, catalogued as RV 589, is a setting of which Latin hymn?
Gloria
Gloria, in the RV 589 setting, lay forgotten until Alfredo Casella revived it at a Vivaldi Week in 1939. Vivaldi wrote at least three settings of the text, and one of them is lost.
Q 23In 1926, fourteen bound volumes of Vivaldi's long-lost music turned up in what kind of building in Piedmont?
A monastery
Kramer vs. Kramer borrowed a piece Vivaldi wrote in 1725, more than 250 years before the film was made. The concerto, catalogued as RV 425, has three short movements.
Q 14Although Vivaldi worked in Venice, The Four Seasons was first printed in 1725 in which foreign city?
Amsterdam
Amsterdam was home to the publisher Michel-Charles Le Cène, who issued the set. Vivaldi had first chosen a foreign printer there in 1711 for his breakthrough Opus 3.
Q 15The Four Seasons opens Vivaldi's Opus 8, a set of twelve concertos titled The Contest Between Harmony and what?
Invention
Invention, in the title, stands for creative imagination set against strict technique. The Italian word for contest can also mean a test, so Vivaldi may have been advertising his skill at both.
Q 16Vivaldi's The Four Seasons depicts storms, birdsong and barking dogs, making it an early example of which genre?
Program music
Program music paints a scene or tells a story without words, and Vivaldi was determined to prove it could be taken seriously. He matched his score closely to the printed poems.
Q 17Each concerto in Vivaldi's The Four Seasons arranges its three movements in which order of tempos?
Fast–slow–fast
Fast–slow–fast is the shape of all four concertos, and each accompanying poem is split three ways to match. Vivaldi helped turn the solo concerto into a widely followed form.
Q 18In the second movement of Spring from Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, which instrument imitates a goatherd's barking dog?
Viola
Viola players take the part of the dog, barking away while the goatherd sleeps. Vivaldi even wrote the words for a barking dog into the score as an instruction.
Q 19Who baptised the newborn Antonio Vivaldi at home immediately after his birth in 1678, probably because of poor health?
The midwife
The midwife performed the emergency baptism herself, and the church ceremonies were supplied two months later. Vivaldi's health stayed fragile for the rest of his life.
Q 20Which Holy Roman Emperor gave Vivaldi a knighthood and a gold medal after meeting him in Trieste in 1728?
Charles VI
Charles VI was such an admirer that Vivaldi dedicated his Opus 9 concertos, La cetra, to him. The emperor's death years later left the composer stranded without a patron.
A monastery had kept the volumes, which were thought to have been lost during the Napoleonic Wars. They held 300 concertos, 19 operas and more than 100 vocal works.
Q 24Vivaldi's oratorio Juditha triumphans celebrated Venice's 1716 victory over the Turks in the siege of which island?
Corfu
Corfu held out after a Turkish landing in July 1716, and Venice rejoiced. At the Pietà, every role in the oratorio, the enemy general included, was sung by the house's own singers.
Q 25Which violinist passed off his own Concerto in C as a rediscovered Vivaldi work, helping to revive Vivaldi's reputation?
Fritz Kreisler
Fritz Kreisler admitted in 1935 that he had written several pieces he had credited to older composers. His fake Vivaldi concerto spurred the French scholar Marc Pincherle to study the real thing.
Q 26Which American poet, with the violinist Olga Rudge, became a key figure in the Vivaldi revival of the 1930s?
Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound organised a concert series in the Italian town of Rapallo, where Rudge performed. She went on to publish a catalogue of Vivaldi's works and to publicise hundreds of forgotten concertos.
Q 27Which older Italian composer, who pioneered the concerto grosso in Rome, was one of Vivaldi's biggest influences?
Arcangelo Corelli
Arcangelo Corelli set a small group of soloists against a full string orchestra, and several concertos in Vivaldi's Opus 3 follow that Roman model. Vivaldi's own speciality became the single soloist.
Q 28Around 1718 Vivaldi left Venice to become court music director for the governor of which Italian city?
Mantua
Mantua employed him for three years as maestro di cappella to Prince Philip of Hesse-Darmstadt. He produced several operas there before moving on to Milan and Rome.
Q 29The governors of Venice's Pietà voted seven to six in 1709 to do what to their violin master Vivaldi?
Let him go
Let him go was the verdict, and it did not last: after a spell as a freelance he was recalled in 1711 by a unanimous vote. Five years later he was put in charge of all the music there.
Q 30Benedetto Marcello's satire Il teatro alla moda mocked Vivaldi under which thinly disguised name?
Aldiviva
Aldiviva, an anagram of A. Vivaldi, is printed under the cover engraving. The drawing shows a little angel in a priest's hat playing the violin on a boat that stood for Vivaldi's opera house.