The title of the new Italian film Primavera translates in English as “spring,” which is certainly one of the four seasons of that most famous piece by composer Antonio Vivaldi. But this is not the sort of movie where you should expect the writing and appreciation of “The Four Seasons” to assume centre stage, or really, any part of the stage at all. In fact, although Vivaldi is a character in this movie, it’s more about a gifted young violinist Vivaldi mentors, and “The Four Seasons” themselves only get mentioned in a postscript.

That’s because this group of concertos (or “concerti” in Italian) was something of a postscript for Vivaldi himself, not earning him the riches their modern appreciation would make you think they did. In fact, the man died ignominiously, in poverty. Before that, he was hired to conduct the all-female music ensemble Ospedale della Pieta, composed of musicians who were abandoned as children and raised in an orphanage, because he was the far cheaper option to his predecessor. He was also labouring under a chronic illness and was an ordained priest. It’s amazing the things you can learn from a movie devoted to an underexamined portion of music history, isn’t it?

Damiano Michieletto’s film is the sort you would ordinarily see made by Hollywood, not by Italians eager to bring a favourite son to the rest of the world. That wouldn’t be because the Italians lacked the will, but possibly the resources for such a handsome costume drama – or that might be the broad assumption, anyway. But as very handsome films by Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino can attest, the resources are not a problem, and it’s interesting to be enlightened on all these very particular details of Vivaldi’s life over these 110 minutes.

Cecilia (Tecla Insolia) is the most accomplished of the cohort of violinists whose unique background involves being raised as orphans in an early 18th Venice orphanage. However, part of the arrangement is that the orphanage may marry them off as they see fit, usually for a corresponding donation, and that’s to be Cecilia’s fate as she waits for her future husband, Sanfermo (Stefano Accorsi), to return from the Ottoman-Venetian War. This might not be such a disagreeable state of affairs if the marriage did not mean an immediate cessation of her musical pursuits. If wife or violinist are the two choices, it’s not a competition at all for Cecilia.

The young woman is encouraged by the orphanage’s new music teacher, conductor and composer, Antonio Vivaldi (Michele Riondino). He’s entranced by her playing, finding it to be absent the desire to earn praise, and to exist solely for the love of the music. It’s for this reason he chooses Cecilia for first violin even though her rival, Laura (Hildegard de Stefano), may have greater technical skill, and lasted longer in the endurance contest that formed the audition. He may also be falling for her, a problem indeed for a priest many years her senior.

Cecilia also carries an obsession about her birth mother, since the mothers who abandoned their children sometimes return to the pieta to claim them, and do so by revealing the other half of a memento they cut in two and left with the child.

By focusing most of the narrative on Cecilia, Michieletto finds a compelling way to avoid the traps of a typical biopic, to say nothing of the fact that the subject’s signature work never even makes an appearance in the film. It’s like we’re getting a sideways glance at Antonio Vivaldi, rather than learning all the steps he took as a younger man to get to this point, how he acquired his chronic illness in which he’s continually coughing into a cloth, and much of anything about his musical inspirations and compositional methods. Depending on how much you innately want to learn about Vivaldi, this could be considered either a strength or weakness of Primavera.

But Tecla Insolia in the central role does reward the decision. She’s a compelling protagonist for the film, a sort of proto-feminist in a world that in some ways greatly honoured the capabilities of women, and in others dismissed them utterly. That one of the region’s most prestigious musical cohorts should be composed entirely of women – some only teenagers, all of them orphans – seems truly extraordinary. But that they should forfeit any and all of this independence, as well as heaps of evident skill, as soon as a husband wants to claim them? It reminds us of what Cecilia was always up against, and how likely she ever was to succeed.

Primavera looks the part, too. Few details have been spared in the recreation of early 18^th century Venice, with powdered wigs aplenty and authentic spaces for the orphanage and concert venues. We get a real sense of how this society functioned, who its players were, and who were ground under its heels.

Michieletto made his name as a director of operas, and his transition to film has been an auspicious one. Given his career preoccupations prior to now, that makes it especially curious that the film is more about this young performer, the questions of her parentage, and how she bucks against a society stacked against her, than it is about the music. Curious, and compelling.

 

Primavera opens tomorrow in Australian cinemas.