Sorting Vivaldi!
Antonio Vivaldi's one of those composers most people have heard something of, even if they don't know who or what... though my betting is that it's likely to be one of the Four Seasons violin concerti!
His ready popularity with those four concerti makes it temptingly easy to dismiss him as a lightweight -or, worse, a repetitive lightweight. Stravinsky famously did, for example, when he said that, "Vivaldi is greatly overrated—a dull fellow who could compose the same form so many times over." Note, by the way, that he did not say "he didn’t actually compose 500 concertos, he just wrote the same concerto 500 times": no-one's quite sure where that joke came from -or why the number 500 is sometimes given as 400- but in whatever form, it's not Stravinsky's. [...]