Contemporary accounts by male writers never fail to comment on the musicians, such as this cringe-worthy observation by the British choreographer, John Essex. Performances at the Pietà and its rival ospedali became a must-see for visitors to Venice, and not just for the music. With his reputation grew the status of the Pietà, which elevated him to maestro di coro, allowing him to focus more on composing and conducting. More than once his annual contract was terminated and reinstated by the board between 17. After a brief stint as a priest, Vivaldi was first hired by the Pietà as a maestro di violino at age 25 in 1703. This minimized the number of male teachers, contracted one year at a time, in the all-female environment. Music education at the Venetian ospedali was largely based on a peer-teaching system, in which an accomplished senior student known as a figlia di cori ( cori meaning musical establishment as a whole, not just singers) would be assigned to teach younger students. To this day, a marble plaque embedded in the wall of a later church of Santa Maria della Pietà invokes the warning of Pope Paul III in 1548 of dire consequences for parents abandoning children there if they could afford to raise them.
Founded in 1336, the Pietà was unique in being both single-sex and accepting infant girls born both in and out of wedlock, provided the child was small enough to fit in a box near the door. Aside from his forty-six operas, most of his five hundred-plus concertos, ninety solo sonatas, and dozens of choral works resulted from his thirty-year association as teacher, conductor, and composer for the orphans in the Ospedale della Pietà, one of four such institutions with prominent musical establishments in Venice. The vast majority of Antonio Vivaldi’s prolific compositions resulted from his various responsibilities in his long teaching career.
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