HARRIET CONSTABLE The Instrumentalist. Reviewed by Ann Skea

Harriet Constable’s debut novel takes inspiration from a real-life Venetian prodigy who was both a student of and rival to Vivaldi.

Anna Maria della Pietà is destined for greatness.

At eight, she knows it as surely as string knows bow, as lightning knows storm, as water knows sky. She knows, like she knows that one of her toes sticks out at an angle, that the meat on Wednesdays tastes like fish, and that the note C is green.

Anna Maria sees sounds as colours. The first time she hears a violin being played by a maestro, she sees the bow ‘fly back and forth’ and

the colours of her mind start to flow. Amber, gold, citrus and white, silver and ochre and puce. The shades blast past her eyes. She has to hold the doorfame to steady herself.

She has been learning the flute and the oboe, but the colours don’t flow, they are ‘all dull, muddied’. Now she is determined to ‘get her hands on’ a violin.

Anna Maria della Pietà, or to be more precise, Anna Marie della Pio Ospedale della Pietà (the Devout Hospital of Mercy), is one of the orphaned or abandoned children brought up by the nuns in this charitable convent. The girls are schooled in embroidery, lace-making and, especially, in music; in the eighteenth century this convent was famous for its all-female orchestra, the figlie di coro.

The virtuoso violinist whose playing Anna Maria heard that day was 24-year-old Antonio Vivaldi, an ordained priest who had just been hired by the Ospedale as a music teacher. One morning Anna Maria and her close friends Paulina and Agata arrive at the music room to find this young man waiting:

‘I am your new teacher,’ he says, moving toward the chalk-board in front of them …

 He writes his name, tiny pieces of chalk dust drifting to the ground as he underlines it twice.

Anna Maria feels her breath catch. She has heard of him, of course. Everyone has heard of him. He is a maestro, renowned for his virtuosic violin playing throughout the Republic. Venice’s one to watch …

But he is not what she expected. In her mind he’d been taller, more handsome. Instead, his shoulders slouch like he’s in some kind of pain, and there’s a weakness to his hands without his violin. He seems unsure what to do with them.

So begins their first violin lesson, but Anna Maria, who had secretly stolen into the room where she first heard him and had been caught with his violin in her hands, is to be punished. The lesson is to progress but she is only allowed to watch as the other girls learn how to hold a violin and how to play a few basic notes on the Ospedale’s battered instruments. She watches carefully, then, unable to stop herself,

she lunges for the violin in front of her, lifts the sleek wooden form beneath her chin. Pleasure shivers through her at the feeling. An extension of her own body.

She fumbles to find the hand position, presses hard on the strings. Her nostrils are flared, her lips clenched with focus as she traces the colour trail he has left. Reds, yellows, greens and blues. Red, red, blue, green, blue, green blue. There is no violin any more. No Anna Maria anymore. Simply colour, sound and a feeling, something calm and certain, of a body finding its soul.

Unlikely as this sudden skill sounds here, it is true that Vivaldi did, in fact, see something exceptional in eight-year-old Anna Maria della Pietà and nourished it. She became the youngest ever to join the figlie di coro; she was declared a maestro at 18 for her exceptional violin playing; and, years later, she became the first female Maestro di Coro (Master of Music) when Vivaldi left the Ospedale for the court of Emperor Charles VI in Vienna.

In spite of her fame, little is known of Anna Maria’s life and works, but in The Instrumentalist Harriet Constable takes what is known and builds on it to give her a full, exciting, and sometimes dangerous and traumatic life, full of colour, music, friendship, excitement and betrayal, and full, too, of the richness and diversity and brilliance of eighteenth-century Venice.

Constable’s Anna Maria is, from her earliest days, ambitious and determined to succeed. We meet her first as an unnamed baby whose desperate 17-year-old mother is trying to drown them both in a canal:

But the creature, shocked by the chill, by the wet, by the lack of oxygen, erupts. It’s angry and alive and real again all of a sudden, struggling against her grip.

Just stop just shush, she begs. Not much longer now.

But it is a raging firestorm of a thing, and she cannot hold it back. Their heads tear above the surface as both of them scream for breath, for life.

The woman who finds them ‘was once a cortigna lume too, a hustler who lost her looks but kept her resilience’. She takes them in, promising to get the young woman work in her old brothel, but the baby must go to the nuns’ orphanage. So, she is ‘posted’, together with a note and half a playing card, through a special hole in the wall of the Ospedale, and the nuns who collect her and record her arrival time and date, name her Anna Maria della Pietà.

Anna Maria remembers nothing of her earliest years in the convent. Her first memories are of playing games with Paulina and Agata; of their being the ‘inseparable triplets’ always getting into mischief; and of pretending to be a maestro, with Paulina and Agata as her enthusiastic audience. She knew even then that she wanted to be famous and nothing, not even friendships, must stand in her way.

Vivaldi nourishes her ambitions and gives her private lessons. ‘I have never known a girl to play like this,’ he tells her after testing her by making her copy phrases that he plays. ‘Not any so young as you.’ ‘Being a girl’ is not something Anna Maria ‘has given much thought to’. Being a girl, however, becomes a problem when, much later, she begins to compose her own violin pieces and wants recognition for them. For the moment, however, she is focused on becoming one of the elite figlie di coro girls, who ‘play lots of concerts, and they make money. Real money, of their own.’ They also have ‘nicer clothes, more regular baths, better food’.

When she does gain entry to this famous group, Vivaldi takes her to a workshop in the Arsenale of Venice to buy her a violin. Seeing violins ‘hanging in a tall glass cabinet like clothes on a rail’, Anna Maria feels that she has ‘come to the land where instruments are born’. ‘We are luthiers. Violin makers,’ the owner, Nicholo Selles, tells her, ‘each of us has our own skill’; and she sees the carefully chosen wood being carved into scrolls, the instrument shells being varnished, the bows being strung with cat-gut: ‘Not actual cats,’ he chuckles, ‘but intestines, yes, from sheep mainly.’ He tells her, too, that ‘choosing a violin is like choosing a spouse’, and that musicians often ‘spend months’, returning again and again, until they find the one that suits them best.

Eventually, Anna Maria’s violin is ready and Vivaldi takes her to collect it. It suits her perfectly. ‘It is the first thing, other than the playing card and note, that has ever been truly hers,’ and she feels as if ‘she has been handed her missing limb’. Through all the dramas that subsequently happen in her life, she will never be parted from it.

Anna Maria’s skill is exceptional and she begins to play solos in concerts performed before important people. Vivaldi, seeing her complimented, becomes jealous and cold towards her. She and other members of the figlie work with him, imitating his style and elaborating on his compositions, but Anna Maria is composing her own pieces and, eventually, plays one of them to him, passing it off as something she found among old manuscripts he has given her. When he does discover what she is doing, he lets her perform in a concert, but then acknowledges the applause himself, omitting to indicate that it is her work. Later, when she challenges him about this, he is unrepentant:

‘You are, after all, a girl, a woman. What did you think? That you were going to take a place in history as one of the greatest composers of all time? To have your work published in your own right?’

‘That’s exactly what is going to happen,’ she says, heat flushing up her neck. ‘I’m a maestro, I am the best there is.’

She is furious but he has control, and he takes the ultimate revenge, which almost destroys her. The final pages of the book are full of drama as she deals with her devastation and, to her surprise, finds someone who is willing to support her and help her achieve her ambitions.

The Instrumentalist is a remarkable debut novel. At times the events are almost too dramatic and too imaginative to be credible, but Harriet Constable has done her research well and uses concert reports from contemporary news-sheets, letters, and other sources to weave facts into this fiction. Her characters are full of life, and the drama, the music, the costumes, the brilliance of Venice and its hidden darkness, all make her book absorbing and enjoyable.

It is a story, too, that could well become a popular film or TV series.

Harriet Constable The Instrumentalist Bloomsbury PB 336pp $32.99

Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994, and currently available for free download here). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (ann.skea.com) are archived by the British Library.

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Tags: Anna Maria della Pietà, Harriet | Constable, historical fiction, music, novels based on real people, prodigies, Venice, violinists, Vivaldi, women composers