Happy Birthday Antonio!

It's the birthday of Antonio Lucio Vivaldi, who came into the world on today's date in 1678 a few days after an earthquake shook Venice. The newborn was baptized immediately -- just in case little Antonio's first day also turned out to be his last.
Vivaldi's father was a violinist, and even though Antonio quickly became a virtuoso on that instrument himself, he trained to become a Roman Catholic priest.
Vivaldi complained of chest pains whenever he said Mass -- a medical excuse that allowed him to forego his priestly duties and to concentrate on writing music, including dozens of operas and hundreds of concertos.
By his mid-40s, Vivaldi was a major figure on the European musical scene, but his fortunes gradually took a turn for the worse. The Church ordered him to stop composing music for the theater and, for heaven's sake, to stop gadding around Europe in the company of female opera singers! Vivaldi came to Vienna in 1740, hoping to find favor with the Austrian Emperor Charles VI, who was a big fan of his music, but after eating some bad mushrooms, the Emperor had died. And the following year Vivaldi himself died -- broke -- at the age of 63.
Some 200 years after his death, Vivaldi's set of violin concertos titled "The Four Seasons" would become one of the best-known and most ubiquitous musical works of the late 20th century.