In 1926, researchers in a monastic boarding school archive in Piedmont found 15 bound volumes of handwritten music that should have been destroyed in the Napoleonic Wars. They held the lost legacy of Antonio Vivaldi. This episode debunks the earthquake myth around his 1678 birth, explains how chronic asthma ended his career saying public Mass, and shows how that dispensation freed him to teach at the Ospedale della Pietà, where he turned orphan girls into a world-class ensemble performing behind ornate metal grilles.

The episode follows Vivaldi’s contract to write two new concertos a month, his firing in 1709 and unanimous rehiring in 1711, his career as an impresario at the Teatro Sant’Angelo, and his battle with censors over Arsilda’s plot of a woman disguised as a man. It covers Benedetto Marcello’s satirical pamphlet, his years in Mantua with singer Anna Girò, the programmatic innovations of The Four Seasons, and the fire sale of manuscripts that funded a fatal move to Vienna, where he died impoverished in July 1741.

• Why Venice’s independence from Rome let an ordained priest run a commercial theater
• The barking dog on the viola, buzzing mosquitoes and ice skating that Vivaldi wrote into The Four Seasons
• How Emperor Charles VI’s sudden death left Vivaldi stranded, broke, and buried in a pauper’s grave that no longer exists
• Fritz Kreisler’s fake lost Vivaldi concerto that accidentally revived scholarly interest
• A lost opera discovered in an archive as recently as 2002