Without any doubt, Vivaldi's cantatas for solo voice remain the least explored corner of his music. Least researched, least discussed, least performed, least familiar. Many obvious reasons for this comparative neglect spring to mind. The genre itself is not especially favoured by musicologists concerned with the repertory of the Baroque period, who are more likely to win their laurels with studies of sonatas, concertos, sacred vocal music or – increasingly – opera. Except for specialists, singers tend to avoid them: they are hard to ‘sell’ to a modern audience, presupposing, as they do, not merely a knowledge of Italian but also a connoisseurship of Italian poetry in all its aspects. The music can be difficult to find and decipher, and technically very challenging. In any case, this is a repertory from which the male singer, except for the fortunate counter-tenor, is virtually excluded.

But perhaps the most potent reason for the marginalization of the chamber cantata – and this is as true for composers specializing in the genre, such as Alessandro Scarlatti and Benedetto Marcello, as it is for Vivaldi – is that, historically speaking, the Baroque cantata is a dead end. Unlike most other genres, which navigated the passage from Baroque to Classical (and beyond) smoothly, despite undergoing much change on the way, the single-voice cantata (we are not speaking here of the dramatic cantata, or serenata, which proved longer-lived) simply petered out in the course of the second half of the eighteenth century: it was replaced by arias and songs of various descriptions that rejected, rather than transplanted, its musical substance.