The Forgotten Female Musicians Behind Vivaldi - Interview with Author Harriet Constable

August 20, 2024, 5:43 PM · Composer Antonio Vivaldi lived hundreds of years ago - from 1678 to 1741 - yet his music remains very much alive today. His "Four Seasons" remains one of the most performed and recorded works ever, and his violin concertos are still a staple in any young violinist's development, as any Suzuki Book 4 student can attest.

But did you know that he wrote many of his works for a female ensemble at a girls' orphanage in Venice? Many of us who are schooled in classical music do know this - but it is often presented as a footnote to the larger biography of the "Red Priest," as Vivaldi was known because of his red hair. He taught music at the orphanage - called the Ospedale della Pietà - and the female musicians whom he taught in turn pushed his own creativity. They tested his new works, performed them, served as copyists and possibly assisted in writing them.

A new historical fiction book by British author Harriet Constable provides a fictionalized exploration of the life of one of those orphans, the violinist Anna Maria de la Pietà, who was dropped through a hole in the wall at the Ospedale della Pietà shortly after her birth before the turn of the 18th century. She lived there until her death in 1782. The book, called The Instrumentalist, was released today. (Click here for purchase options.)

Author Harriet Constable, and her debut novel, The Instrumentalist.

It's a debut novel for Constable, who became intrigued with this story in 2019, when she picked up a coffee-table book at an Airbnb while on summer vacation in Palo Alto, Calif.

"It was the last place I expected to discover a detail that would change the course of my life," Constable told me in an interview over Zoom earlier this month. "I flipped open to a page, and it happened to mention that Vivaldi taught in this orphanage in Venice for his entire career, and that the orphanage was full of women and girls, and that he composed all of his music while he was there."

"I immediately started researching, because I was very surprised to hear this, and frustrated that I didn't know about it," Constable said. While Constable is not a professional musician, her mother is a classically trained cellist, and she grew up playing the flute and piano and listening to the music of Bach, Vivaldi and Mozart. "With my background in journalism and the musical background, I thought I probably would have heard about hundreds of women and girls that were vital to Vivaldi - right?"

"Of course, once I got started on that research, I discovered there was so much to uncover," Constable said. "This period in Venice was so vivid and exciting, and the contribution of these women and girls so enormous. It was just a massive, untold story that needed more attention."

Likewise, when Constable's book came across my desk in its pre-published form earlier this year, I was immediately interested. "The Instrumentalist" is not the first novel written about the subject, but it is different in tone from others. I'd previously read related books, namely Vivaldi's Virgins, written in 2007 by Barbara Quick; The Four Seasons, written in 2008 by Laurel Corona; and The Violinist of Venice, written in 2015 by Alyssa Palombo. While each of these books is enjoyable and full of a great deal of well-researched history - they all lean undeniably toward historical romance.

Constable's compelling book - while imaginative in bringing to life its characters - holds to her background as a journalist, frequently yanking the reader back into the brutal realities of 18th century life. The opening pages, for example, are not fare for young readers. They describe a desperate young sex worker giving birth with the reluctant aid of a back-alley midwife. Unable to follow through with suicide or infanticide, she must place her baby through a hole in the Pietà's wall before it grows too big to fit. As she places her baby in the hole, she witnesses the babies that did not fit - dying on the street next to the wall.

The babies who didn't fit in the hole - this was among the many details that Constable unearthed in her research.

"You couldn't get into the Pietà unless you were a baby, and a baby small enough to be posted through the hole in the wall," Constable said. "So famously, there were babies left outside, as in the beginning chapter. If you weren't able to through that hole, you might be left beneath it, in hopes of getting in. And they didn't get in. That's all true."

Anna Maria de la Pietà - Constable's main character - is a real person with a documented existence. She was taught by Vivaldi, who in turn dedicated 28 violin concertos to her. She was an accomplished musician who played not only the violin, but also the cello, oboe, lute, mandolin, harpsichord and viola d'amore. She composed and performed prolifically for more than 60 years, and while she never left the Pietà, her reputation for virtuosity spread far and wide, attracting tourists from across Europe to attend her weekend performances at the Pietà.

"There were so many things that I could find out about Anna Maria - I could find out that Vivaldi bought her a violin, and that he composed music for her, and that she was posted through the wall of the Pietà, and what year she was posted," Constable said. "But one of the big things I couldn't find out was: What did all of this feel like, for Anna Maria? I had to interpret that."

How did Constable go about creating a personality for Anna Maria?

"I created a huge, horizontal kind of history, a timeline," she said. Constable took the facts and details she had gathered, and she plotted Anna Maria's story next to Vivaldi's story. Then she plotted the facts about 18th-century Venice next to other major cities like Paris and London at the time. Then she plotted the facts about Vivaldi and Anna Maria as composers, next to contemporaneous or overlapping composers like Bach and Mozart.

"As I did that, I started to piece together a mindset and a worldview for Anna Maria that I thought was reasonable, which allowed me to interpret her personality and elements of who 'my' Anna Maria might become," Constable said. "I knew I needed a way to express the music that did justice to her creative brilliance. I also wanted to express how this music was the light in her otherwise quite dark and treacherous life. The Pietà was quite a brutal place to grow up - but the great contradiction is that she and the girls who grew up there were given this musical education and the chance to have careers, earn money and rub shoulders with kings and queens."

One bit of creative license that Constable took was to make Anna Maria a synaesthete - someone who senses color in sound.

"I felt that giving her synaesthesia would be a way to express this exciting period for Anna Maria, and more generally for Venice, this republic of music, where music is literally floating up into the sky and exploding in reds and greens and blues. It was also a way of making anyone feel that they were welcome to this story, that they could revel in and enjoy the music, whether they already knew about classical music or not."

One detail that caught my interest was the fact that the female musicians of the Pietà were often hidden from view, when they performed for an audience.

"Sometimes they were required to perform behind these grated bars," Constable said. "It was deemed that they should be heard but not seen because they were so angelic, especially when they would sing. People were concerned that they would entice men to sin, simply by seeing them, because their voices were so amazing."

However the reality was a little different.

"(The writer and philosopher Jean-Jacques) Rousseau, famously, was desperate to get behind the bright curtain and see them," Constable said. At last he was allowed to do so, "and when he did, he wrote that they were visually horrid - an incredibly unkind way of describing them - but it was because they were physically scarred. Some of them were missing eyes, toes, fingers, scarred from the pox. So the Pietà was a pretty brutal place to grow up. Obviously, some of this was caused by disfigurements from disease, but the fact that they were missing eyes, toes, other things - that suggests either a level of brutality or a level of neglect."

Constable started working on The Instrumentalist in the autumn of 2021, when the pandemic was still limiting travel. She had never been to Venice, and she definitely wanted to go, as part of her research.

"I could finally go in January of 2022 - and it was a unique time to be there. There were almost no tourists, and a lot of things were still closed from the pandemic," Constable said. "It felt like I had the place to myself for a month, until Carnival began. It stayed very quiet - kind of haunted, but beautiful and interesting."

"I had been so focused on the politics of the story and on gathering research and information, that I hadn't really thought about the setting at all," Constable said. "When I finally got there, it was like stepping onto set - because Venice hasn't changed much since Anna Maria's time, really."

"I realized some of the themes of the story: that Anna Maria lived on this constant knife's edge between glory and the abyss - making it as a great musician, and the possibility of falling back into the sort of dark, tragic, treacherous roots from which she came. That was so echoed in the setting, in the scenery of Venice, from the glittering ballrooms to the crumbling buildings and the dank canal. I thought, this is going to be such a gift to play with."

"I tried to immerse myself in that world as much as possible, to imagine I was Anna Maria," Constable said. "I would play the 'Four Seasons' on my AirPods and run around, imagining I could see the colors."

She went to the Pietà, which had been turned into a hotel. To get the feeling of the musical setting, she went to Venice's Conservatoire of Music. "I took a tour of the conservatoire and interviewed some students," she said. "Then I stood on the rooftop there, imagining what it was like. Standing outside, you have this amazing melding of sounds - a singer from one window, a violinist from another and a pianist from another. I went back there many times, just to stand outside. People must have thought I was quite strange! But it's a magical spot."

In one part of the book, Anna Maria's manuscripts are tragically burned - I wondered if this was a documented occurrence.

"Anna Maria's part book is missing, yes. But also, this is a metaphor for all of the music that is missing - hundreds and hundreds of years of creation," Constable said. "The fact that we have lost or deleted hundreds of years of creation that came from women is a very sad thing. We should notice that silence. But also - there are ways in which we can listen again, and listen differently."

"These girls were there for the birth of an entirely new form of music, the concerto," Constable said. "And that level of innovation, this kind of explosion of creativity - doesn't happen simply. It doesn't happen without enormous resource and enormous imagination. That's what these women and girls provided - a test bed and breeding ground, at the very least, and perhaps they were even active participants in the creation of the work."

"When you listen to Vivaldi's 'Four Seasons,' - know that these girls would have probably been some of the first to play it," she said. "Know you're not just hearing spring, summer, autumn, winter. You're hearing their rage and their hope and their dreams and the glory of their lives. Listen for that in this music, and it really sounds different."

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Click here for the link to purchase Harriet Constable's new book, The Instrumentalist.

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