The Numbering of Vivaldi’s Bassoon Concerti

If you’ve ever played, lis­tened to, or researched any­thing by Anto­nio Vival­di, then you’ve prob­a­bly run into the mish­mash of dif­fer­ent num­ber­ing sys­tems for his works. There are in fact five sep­a­rate cat­a­loging schemes for Vivaldi’s instru­men­tal pieces, each with its own inter­nal log­ic, and there’s no sim­ple way to con­vert from one to anoth­er on the fly. It can thus be incred­i­bly frus­trat­ing to go from a schol­ar­ly arti­cle to per­form­ing edi­tions to crit­i­cal or com­plete works edi­tions to record­ings, as each of those media may well ref­er­ence a dif­fer­ent num­ber for the same piece. If you care to know why there are so many dif­fer­ent sys­tems, see my expla­na­tions at the bot­tom of this page.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time think­ing about Vivaldi’s 39 bas­soon con­cer­ti. The Meg Quigley Vival­di Com­pe­ti­tion, for which I’m the Co-Exec­u­tive Direc­tor, uses a dif­fer­ent Vival­di con­cer­to each time around. I wrote the lin­er notes for the first disc of Nad­i­na Mack­ie’s series of all the con­cer­ti. I’ve cre­at­ed a num­ber of per­form­ing edi­tions of Vival­di con­cer­ti, includ­ing the Con­cer­to in g minor, RV 495. Through­out, I’ve been able to keep all the num­ber­ing sys­tems straight thanks to the table below, which lists all 39 con­cer­ti (includ­ing the two which are incom­plete) along with their des­ig­na­tions in each of the five extant num­ber­ing sys­tems. The table is sortable—click a col­umn head­er to sort by that system.

This table builds on an excel­lent ear­li­er Table of Con­cor­dances by  Jef­frey Lyman, which itself drew on work by Trevor Cramer and George Conrey.

Only twelve col­lec­tions of con­cer­ti and sonatas (none for bas­soon) were pub­lished dur­ing Vivaldi’s own life­time — these com­prise 114 works out of his total out­put of more than 850. These were assigned opus num­bers, but as far as we know, he did­n’t num­ber or oth­er­wise record the order of the rest of his com­po­si­tions. Over the years a num­ber of schol­ars have tak­en on the task of group­ing and order­ing Vivaldi’s works, each tak­ing a some­what dif­fer­ent approach. Here’s a brief run­down of the var­i­ous systems:

Ryom: Peter Ryom’s Anto­nio Vival­di: The­ma­tisch-sys­tem­a­tis­ches Verze­ich­nis sein­er Werke (2007) is the most com­plete, accu­rate, and up-to-date cat­a­log of Vivaldi’s com­po­si­tions. It includes vocal works (left out of most ear­li­er list­ings) as well as many more recent dis­cov­er­ies. Although the full cat­a­log was only pub­lished in 2007, an ini­tial ver­sion appeared in 1974 and its RV num­bers have been the stan­dard in schol­ar­ly dis­course ever since. Ryom’s sys­tem con­sists of a main sequence of num­bers (RV 1—808) with a sep­a­rate list­ing (RV Anh. 1—134) for ques­tion­able or spu­ri­ous works. The main sequence is oga­nized in a hier­ar­chy of genre and instru­men­ta­tion. We can nar­row from Instru­men­tal Works (RV 1—585), to Works for One Solo Instru­ment with Strings and Bas­so Con­tin­uo (RV 170—504), final­ly arriv­ing at Con­cer­tos for Bas­soon (RV 466—504). With­in each nar­row cat­e­go­ry, pieces are arranged by key.

Rinal­di: Mario Rinal­di pub­lished the first seri­ous cat­a­log of Vivaldi’s music in 1945. He orga­nized Vivaldi’s works into col­lec­tions, mod­eled after the twelve col­lec­tions that were pub­lished dur­ing the com­poser’s life­time. This unfor­tu­nate­ly gives the impres­sion of chrono­log­i­cal order­ing where there is none. He assigned the bas­soon con­cer­ti to Op. 40, 45, and 57.

Pincher­le: Marc Pincher­le includ­ed a the­mat­ic cat­a­log as the sec­ond vol­ume of his 1948 book Anto­nio Vival­di et las musique instru­men­tale. Pincher­le grouped and num­bered con­cer­ti by key, but not by solo instrument(s). So all of Vivaldi’s con­cer­ti in C major/a minor are list­ed first, fol­lowed by those in G major/e minor, etc. As you might guess from the title of Pincher­le’s book, this num­ber­ing sys­tem includes only instru­men­tal pieces, neglect­ing Vivaldi’s many operas and sacred vocal works.

Malipiero/Tomo: In 1947, the Isti­tu­to Ital­iano Anto­nio Vival­di and the Ital­ian pub­lish­er Ricor­di launched a col­lect­ed edi­tion of Vivaldi’s instru­men­tal works. Some 530 scores were issued over the fol­low­ing two decades, and these were num­bered in order of pub­li­ca­tion. These num­bers are some­times giv­en with a pre­fix of “M” for edi­tor Gian Francesco Malip­iero (e.g. “M 269”). “Tomo” is Ital­ian for tome or vol­ume, and this is how the Ricor­di scores them­selves list the num­bers (e.g. “Tomo 269”).

Fan­na: In 1968, Ricor­di issued an index to its Vival­di edi­tion pre­pared by Anto­nio Fan­na, founder of the Isti­tu­to Ital­iano Anto­nio Vival­di. Fan­na divid­ed the works into six­teen cat­e­gories, by instru­men­ta­tion. F VIII con­tains all of the bas­soon concerti.