Roy Ellefsen ([log in to unmask]) wrote:

>I heard, and therefore don't know the source or the exact wording, that
>Stravinsky once commented that Vivaldi wrote the same concerto a thousand
>times.  If the he (Stravinsky) didn't say it, and nobody knows of a more
>certain source, then I'd like credit for it.

   Vivaldi is greatly overrated - a dull fellow who could compose the
   same form over and so many times over.
      Stravinsky from Conversations with Robert Craft (1958).

Sounds better as usually misquoted.

More apropos:

   Vivaldi is an old man, who has a prodigious fury for composition.
   I heard him undertake to compose a concerto, with all the parts,
   with greater dispatch than a copyist can copy it.
      Charles de Brosses, 1739.

Deryk Barker
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