In retrospect, the darkness of “Winter” conveyed something I could not articulate as a child, namely, the peculiar sadness of Appalachia, the isolation and the poverty. These sounds felt to me like a crucial directional aid, an encrypted message on a map of my future, an aural Polaris. Yet - and to this day I can’t quite explain why - “Winter” remained in my head.īefore I fell asleep each night, I mentally played the few notes I could remember. Eventually the VHS of “Sarah and the Squirrel” disappeared from the video-rental store’s shelves. There were no violin teachers in our part of West Virginia, my parents explained. When no violin arrived, I asked for a violin for Christmas. I asked my parents for a violin for my fifth birthday. Better yet, I wanted to learn to play it myself. All of these events are set to Vivaldi’s “Winter.”įrom there, it took the usual route of earworms: Having heard the music, I was desperate to hear it again. In the cartoon’s final frames, Sarah wanders alone and barefoot through the snow. It is under these circumstances of genocide, starvation and exposure to the elements that she befriends (or perhaps hallucinates) a squirrel.

She escapes the slaughter by hiding in a nearby forest. Sarah’s village is invaded by Nazis, and her family members are captured and taken to a concentration camp. I sat alone in the living room, watching a cartoon movie called “Sarah and the Squirrel.” It was not the lighthearted fare suggested by its title. A snow-laced mountain fog had settled over the Potomac Highlands of West Virginia. I first heard “Winter” in 1985, when I was 4.

Now is the time for “Winter,” a composition that, like the season, holds us in a tighter grip. But, as my fellow millennials know far too well, an ill-timed frost nips yesteryear’s aspirations in the bud. “Spring” is the sassy classical of the baby boomers, music to accompany an anniversary toast at an expensive French restaurant.

Antonio Vivaldi’s “Spring” has more than twice as many film credits as any of its counterparts in his Baroque masterpiece, “The Four Seasons.” “Spring” is weddings and day spas, your toddler’s I.Q.-inflating sleep aid.

Antonio vivaldi winter