Vivaldi

The red-haired priest of Venice, who scarcely ever said mass on account of his asthma. He taught music for nearly forty years at the Ospedale della Pietà, whose orchestra of orphaned girls was famous across Europe, and most of his concertos were written for those students.

More than five hundred concertos, ten of which Bach copied out and arranged — the most direct evidence of his influence there is. The Four Seasons comes with sonnets whose lines correspond point by point to the birdsong, ice, thunderstorm and barking dog in the music, and it is one of the earliest pieces of programme music. He died nearly penniless in Vienna and was buried in a pauper's grave; the music was not rediscovered on any scale until the twentieth century.