Writing "The Four Seasons" – Total Baroque Magazine

Writing “The Four Seasons”

What if The Four Seasons were not just a classical hit, but a time to be experienced through writing? In her book The Rolling Year, Hannah French explores Vivaldi through the rhythm of the months, landscapes and the listening body. An investigation where music, seasons and experience respond to each other, far from abstraction.

A producer and presenter on BBC Radio 3, Hannah French is one of the finest voices in British music broadcasting. In her book The Rolling Year: Listening to the Seasons with Vivaldi , she offers a singular journey through The Four Seasons, written over the course of an entire year, with each movement explored at the very moment it resonates in the calendar. Part sensitive inquiry, part travelogue, part reflection on listening, the book weaves together music, poetry, everyday gestures, and Venetian landscapes, calling on musicians, climatologists, and ornithologists alike. In this interview, Hannah French reflects on her renewed relationship with Vivaldi, on the difficulty of speaking about music from within, and on what these concertos reveal when one agrees to hear them differently. The excerpt that follows, taken from the final movement of Winter, brings this experience into sharp focus—close to risk, the body, and movement. What remains is a subtle yet compelling question: what happens when we finally allow ourselves to slow down and listen in tune with the seasons?

Vivaldi, The Four Seasons, and you — what would that be?

A couple of years ago I decided I wanted to write a book about listening seasonally. When you present a Breakfast show on BBC Radio 3 you think a lot about the music that’s right for that day, that time of year, that season. It got me thinking. I’d had a hunch for a number of years that listening to music intended for a particular day, whether a Bach cantata or a piece written for a summer festival, or winter ice fair, has a grounding, connecting effect on you, however obvious or nuanced that might be. Vivaldi seemed the ideal gateway – everyone knows The Four Seasons, right? But that gateway became my whole book. I quickly realised how little we really know about them, and I simply started asking a lot of questions.

The questions led to writing a book manuscript in the space of a year – each season in its own season. For each month, I lined up conversations with musicians and poets or, as the music and its themes led me – a bird watcher, a bagpipe player, an art historian, a wine merchant, a health expert, a cook, a hotelier, and a climate change researcher. The research led me back to Venice and Mantua, to breathe the air, taste the seasonal produce, experience the festivals, and see the sights as Vivaldi would’ve done himself.