Book review: The unacknowledged role played by women in the work of Great Men offers a rich seam of material for fiction and non-fiction writers. A recent brilliant example is Anna Fuller’s Wifedom, which tracks with forensic precision the suppressed real-life contribution of Eileen O’Shaughnessy to husband George Orwell’s work.
In Harriet Constable’s debut, the life story of the 17th-century Venetian musician Anna Maria della Pietà is reimagined to feature her compositions, including her unacknowledged contributions to the works of her teacher, Antonio Vivaldi. After reading it, The Four Seasons just won’t sound the same.
Anna Maria was an abandoned baby, posted through a hole in the wall of the Pietà, an orphanage for girls run by nuns. The Pietà was no ordinary orphanage. Although brutal – the babies were branded with a “P” on their tiny arms – the girls were educated and given the best music lessons available. That’s because the Pietà's orchestra, the Figlie di Coro, was regarded as the finest in Italy.
Constable’s Anna Maria is exceptionally ambitious. At 8, she “knows she is destined for greatness”. At 14, she wants to see her own name, not that of Vivaldi, on manuscripts. She views her fellow orphan musicians as competitors that must be “crushed”.
It’s historical fact that Vivaldi initially mentors Anna Maria, buying her a violin and composing music for her. Constable has her then compose her own music in secret and, at Vivaldi’s request, improve his manuscripts.
Life inside the Pietà is vividly evoked. It’s comfortless, with endless chores and shadowy passageways, all the orphan girls being scarred in some way – Anna Maria from “the pox”. One friend has a missing eye, the other a fist-sized dent in her head. The nuns are cold, authoritarian figures; there’s not much tenderness, and, perhaps surprisingly, not much religion, either.
Venice itself comes alive, mainly through the sounds drifting through Anna Maria’s barred windows: gondoliers, fruit sellers, combmakers, knife sharpeners, woodcarvers, all plying their trade. On the rare occasions she goes outside, there are muddy canals, bejewelled masks, impoverished lace makers, grand palaces, dens of iniquity. And always music.
Vivaldi does not come out of this well. His extraordinary talent is coupled with a capricious, bullying nature and he is physically weak and unprepossessing. Young musicians of the Figlie di Coro who displease him – and it doesn’t take much – are expelled from the orchestra and forced into marriage by the nuns. Worst of all for any artist, he appropriates and destroys the work of others.
Did he actually do any of this? In an author’s note, Constable refers to evidence suggesting he may have claimed the work of some members of the Figlie di Coro as his own, though not necessarily Anna Maria’s. What is clear is that she was a preternaturally gifted musician who was interested in composition.
The central plot follows Anna Maria’s striving for success and recognition in a world where the odds are overwhelmingly against her, but there’s also her emotional journey. Initially she treats her two friends – whom she loves – as less important than her advancement. But when tragedy strikes, she is challenged to stop seeing people as mere obstacles to fame.
The author grants Anna Maria synesthesia, meaning she sees sound as colour, and this adds a lively and vibrant touch to the many descriptions of the music that fills the Pietà, the churches, the palaces and the squares of Venice.
It’s feminist revisionist history, but it’s evocative, plausible and often gripping. A book not just for music lovers.
The Instrumentalist, by Harriet Constable (Bloomsbury, $38.99), is out now.
