Who composed The Four Seasons?

Vivaldi, around 1720, and each of the four concertos was published with a sonnet - possibly written by Vivaldi himself - describing what the music depicts, with lines printed above the corresponding bars in the score. Barking dog, drunken dancers, a summer thunderstorm, ice underfoot, a goatherd asleep: it is programme music with the programme attached, two centuries before that became fashionable.

He was a priest, nicknamed the Red Priest for his hair, who stopped saying Mass early on citing chest complaints, and spent most of his career as music master at an orphanage for girls in Venice. The Ospedale della Pieta had an orchestra and choir of extraordinary standard, and a great deal of his output was written for teenage girls to perform behind a screen - visitors from across Europe came specifically to hear them.

He then vanished for two hundred years. He died in poverty in Vienna in 1741 and was buried in a pauper's grave; his enormous output went unplayed until manuscripts began resurfacing in the 1920s. The Four Seasons only became ubiquitous after a 1950s recording, and it is now so heavily used in advertising and telephone hold systems that it is hard to hear as the strange, pictorial, slightly wild music it is.