It is a setting of a single section of a mass, but it is almost certainly a complete work and not a fragment, since it was not uncommon to write individual mass movements for specific occasions. In all likelihood, the present Gloria, in which all the vocal solos are for female voices, was written for the girls at the school. In addition to concertos, Vivaldi was asked to write a good deal of religious music for the accomplished musicians at the Ospedale della Pietà, the girls' orphanage in Venice where he served as music director. The Gloria, part of that Turin collection, received its twentieth-century premiere in 1930 and has remained the most popular of all Vivaldi's vocal works ever since. Suddenly, he was much more than a composer of violin concertos. But then, in the late 1920's their view of Vivaldi changed, when a large collection of his vocal music was discovered in Turin.

Those were particularly interesting to scholars and musicians because of their influence on J. When the modern-day Vivaldi revival began early in the twentieth century, attention focused mainly on the composer's concertos.

Vivaldi gloria in d major rv 589