“Anna Maria may have no name, no fortune, no family. But she has her ambition, and her talent.
Her best hope lies in her teacher, Antonio Vivaldi. Soon she is his star pupil.
But as Anna Maria's star rises, not everyone is happy. Because Anna Maria's shining light is threatening to eclipse that of her mentor.
She will leave her mark, whatever it takes. And her story will be heard.”
The challenge with writing a fictitious story based on historical figures, is to balance what we know, with some added excitement that makes us want to read the story. If one of the historical figures is not well known, the writer may feel they can put whatever spin they want on the story and no-one will know how true, or not, the tale is. As the writer, you can be tempted to take the story to whatever place you like. When you partner an unknown character, Anna Maria della Pietà, with a well-known figure such as Antonio Vivaldi (everyone will have heard his Four Seasons at some point in their life) you need to be very careful as to how much you want to interfere with history. Too much interference, and suddenly the interest in your unknown character wanes. Sadly, no-one seems to have given the author of The Instrumentalist this piece of salient advice.
Harriet Constable’s The Instrumentalist is inspired by the real-life Anna Maria della Pietà, who was a Venetian orphan and prodigious violinist. She studied under the tutelage of Antonio Vivaldi but very little is known about her life, so whilst the setting of this story might be historically accurate, the majority of the book is pure fiction. Constable herself acknowledges that she has moved some historical events around for dramatic effect, but has that decision diminished what she was trying to achieve with this book?
The question I asked myself after reading this novel is, what was she trying to achieve?
The book commences with a woman, who works as a prostitute, giving birth to a child. She is forced by circumstance to give the baby up for adoption. She visits Venice’s Ospedale della Pietà and places the baby into an opening in the wall, a safe place a baby could be deposited whilst the mother would remain anonymous. After putting the baby in the baby hatch, she positions a card in her blanket, rings the bell and flees.
I was rather taken by the harsh start to this book, I thought it was an opening to a fascinating story showcasing the Pietà orphans and the prospects that were given to them during a century when there was little opportunity for orphans, especially girls.
The Ospedale della Pietà opened in the early fifteenth century to provide for Venice’s orphaned and abandoned boys and girls. Boys usually left once they could ply a trade, but the girls could remain for their entire life, or until they were married. By the late seventeenth century, the Ospedale was renowned for its music school. The children were given music lessons, and the orphanage raised money from various musical concerts, performed by the most outstanding students, to aristocratic audiences.
In 1704, the composer Antonio Vivaldi, became the master violin tutor. He became the chief composer there until he left Venice in 1740, and he wrote much of his music for the women of the Ospedale. Many of the babies who were abandoned were physically deformed, and Vivaldi had instruments modified for these women so they could participate in lessons. This kindness and forward thinking doesn’t necessarily mean that Vivaldi didn’t have any flaws, but the portrayal of his character in this book seems unnecessarily harsh and at odds with what scholars have written about him. The whole book appears to work on the basis that for Anna Maria to succeed in her ambition to be a great composer, a successful male name in history must be demonised.
History tells us very little about Anna Maria, but from this book she is portrayed as a cold, ambitious and unlikable person. She will not let anything stand in her way, not even her friends who have helped her to reach her goal as the virtuoso violin player she has become. The book repeatedly shows that she wants something, she gets it - by fair means or fowl, is abhorrent to the people around her, but because she’s such a brilliant violinist, all is forgiven… and then she does it all again.
This is a major problem with the book. I’m in favour of a strong-minded female character, but Anna Maria is ruthless. You could argue that this is understandable; she has grown up in an orphanage where you must fight for survival, but there are limits to just how repugnant you can make your protagonist and not lose your audience.
What is far worse than Anna Maria’s character, is the character assassination of Vivaldi. It seems that Anna Maria cannot succeed in her quest to become Maestra unless Vivaldi’s good character is torn apart. Constable implies that his most famous works, La stravaganza and the Four Seasons are both composed by Anna Maria…or that she at least played a pivotal role in their writing. Historically we know that is not possible. La stravaganza was written in 1712 (Anna Maria would have been about 16) and whilst it is not known exactly when the Four Seasons was written, it is thought to have been when Vivaldi had moved from Venice to Mantua.
“one name keeps rising to the surface: Anna Maria della Pietà. A prodigy violinist, she was Vivaldi’s favourite student. He composed many pieces just for her. It was in this experimental environment, with a plethora of talented female musicians to test ideas with, and Anna Maria by his side, that Vivaldi was able to perfect a whole new form of music: the concerto, most famously realised in his Four Seasons. I begin to wonder: is it possible that these girls helped Vivaldi compose his work?” Harriet Constable
Constable admits in an article for The Guardian newspaper (August 2024) that the experts she consulted about Vivaldi all told her he composed music for the Ospedale girls studying in the figlie di coro, he didn’t compose music with them. Whilst it is plausible that the women at the Ospedale could have helped him with compositions, this doesn’t fit the required narrative, so Constable has turned Vivaldi into a jealous brute. As a tutor he is arrogant, cruel and dismissive of Anna Maria’s prodigious talent, purposefully destroying her compositions in front of other students.
When I started reading this book, I thought it was an interesting concept to write about a child growing up in a famous orphanage, who realises her only way to survive is to either accept an arranged marriage or be ambitious enough to become a member of the figlie di coro. Had this book been a work of pure fiction, I probably would have enjoyed it more than I did. I started off appreciating the story and wondering where it would take me, but the further I read, the more disappointed I felt. I don’t think Constable had a clear idea of this book’s identity, so it became a horrible mash-up of reality versus make believe.
‘I still feel there might be more to the story. The ingredients are just too compelling: enormous talent and ambition, plus endless demand for new music, plus the fact that we have erased or demeaned the role women have played in the arts generally.’ Harriet Constable
If this is meant to be a historical novel portraying how talented women have been erased from history, as it would seem from Constable’s quote, then I don’t understand why she changed the character of Chiara della Pietà. Chiara was born about 20 years after Anna Maria and was one of her students. In this novel, Chiara is Anna Maria’s rival, someone who betrayed her. Why does Constable think it acceptable to erase Chiara’s history, to demean the historical accomplishments she made as a solo violinist, whilst making up a heroic story for Anna Maria?
This is a poorly written book which had so much potential. Constable has written a book set in 1695, and used real people as her characters, but she has been unable to write a historically accurate portrayal of them. Instead of showing the real struggles that Anna Maria must have faced, and how she achieved her greatness within the boundaries of the seventeenth century, the writer has gone for the easy option of taking a famous figure and ripping his credibility to shreds. I wanted to know how Anna Maria learnt to play the violin, surely, she didn’t just pick up the instrument and know how to play it from that instant. In real life, she made Maestra at 24 (not 17 as the book leads us to believe) which is a great achievement. So how did she achieve such brilliance? The book would have us believe she could see all the notes as colours and she could just miraculously play, but I thought this use of synaesthesia felt lazy, especially as it was repeated throughout the book. I felt no connection to Anna Maria’s ability, or the beautiful music she was playing and composing.
Constable could have used her research as the basis of a novel with fictitious characters and then it wouldn’t have mattered what they did, how they acted, or how they spoke. This book is supposed to be set around 1700, and whilst the setting and characters are historical, the language used is strangely modern. Why on earth would a teenage girl, who has spent her whole life in an orphanage, flash a “professional” smile to Vivaldi? Where would she have learnt such a concept? And this perception that she would be seen as just “average” if she didn’t make Maestra a couple of years before her peers, surely in the 1700s she would just be striving to get into the figlie di coro and be relieved that she had succeeded.
This book is a disservice to Vivaldi, to Chiara della Pietà and to Anna Maria della Pietà. This is a book full of tired cliches and the only positive I could find is that I did a lot of research into both Anna Maria and Vivaldi after I had read the book. That was much more interesting than this novel. Both Anna Maria and Vivaldi faced different types of adversity from a young age, and both became respected musicians and composers during their lifetimes. Their stories could have been turned into a beautiful book that celebrated both characters and it’s a shame that this book didn’t deliver that remarkable tale.
Genre: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Music, Italy
Release Date: 15th August 2024
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Listening Time: 10h 55m
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