Surprisingly, this story begins in Palo Alto, Califonia. It’s the summer of 2019, and my partner and I are staying in a rental apartment – the sort with faux houseplants and self-help books on the shelves. Tech bros jog by, bedecked in Lululemon. It is not the location I expect to discover a detail that will change the course of my life.
And yet, one day, I pluck the nearest book from the shelf and start flicking through. I land on a line about an orphanage in Venice. It says Antonio Vivaldi taught here, that his students went on to become some of the greatest musicians of the 18th century. I nearly knock over the plastic aloe vera. I’ve been a journalist for the past decade, seeking out untold true stories about remarkable women, and I come from a musical family. The music of the greats – Bach, Mozart, Vivaldi – was the soundtrack to my upbringing. Why have I never heard about this?
I start researching. I learn that the orphanage was created in part because illegitimate babies were being drowned in the Venetian canals. I learn that the girls of the the Ospedale della Pietà were allowed to play instruments usually reserved for men; that they earned money for their performances and rubbed shoulders with kings and queens. “What makes the Pietà so famous,” wrote the Prince of Saxony, Frederick Christian, after seeing them play in 1704, “is not just that all of the instrumentalists are truly excellent musicians, but … that all of the instruments are being played by females without any males in the ensemble at all.”
I discover that Vivaldi spent almost his entire career working at the Pietà and composed most of his pieces while there. But of the hundreds of girls and women who studied there, 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?
A few months in, I start having a vivid daydream: I am following a young woman down a long stone corridor, lit by flickering candles. She holds a glossy violin and bow by her side. I want her to turn back, to look at me, to say something. But the woman speeds up, starts running. I know this is Anna Maria. But what does it feel like to be her? How vital was she to Vivaldi’s creations?
Discovering the real Anna Maria becomes my obsession. Over an autumn in the British Library, I read that she was singled out by her audiences many times. In 1739, French politician Charles de Brosses described her talent as “unsurpassed.” A poem dating to approximately 1740 says of Anna Maria, “in all the world can’t be found her match … woman or man.” How did a girl go from being a destitute orphan to the greatest violinist of the 18th century? I learn it had everything to do with being born into this particular Republic. The Republic of Music.
During the 15th and 16th centuries, faced with high levels of infanticide, plague and famine, Venice developed social welfare policies that included taking responsibility for its foundlings. Orphans were welcomed into the Ospedale della Pietà. The move was “unprecedented in history” according to Jane L Baldauf-Berdes, author of Women Musicians of Venice. Such charity was possible because Venice had enjoyed centuries of economic and political stability. A government ruled – a mix of monarchy, oligarchy and democracy – rather than the church. It gave the citizens freedom, empathy and the chance to cultivate art like nowhere else.
In his book Vivaldi: Genius of the Baroque, Marc Pincherle wrote that by the 18th century there was “a mania for music” in the Republic. Day and night, Venetians sang in the streets and on the canals, with each guild having its own tune. “There was neither a time nor a place where music was not present.” Orphan boys could be put to work from a young age, but what to do with the large numbers of orphan girls? Give them a musical education, the Venetians decided. Teach them instruments. Let them learn how to copy and compose music themselves. The Pietà birthed generations of women with extraordinary musical talent. Women with superstar careers, women who were ambitious and competitive and determined. Women who could not only perform, but create.
Their teacher, Antonio Vivaldi, was a remarkable musician and composer who stunned his audiences. “He placed his fingers at a hair’s breadth from the bridge so that there was hardly room for the bow,” writes an audience member who saw him perform during the Carnival of 1715. “He played thus on all four strings … at unbelievable speed … everyone was astonished.” But the Republic’s mania for music placed a crushing demand on Vivaldi’s time. He was required to compose endlessly, not just for the orchestra but for external clients too. Vivaldi worked with several copyists to meet the demand – including women and girls from the Pietà. One of them was Anna Maria.
“A copyist would often be called upon to piece together an ostensibly new work … from fragments of earlier works,” Michael Talbot writes in his book Vivaldi. Manuscripts “containing other hands besides [Vivaldi’s] and non-autograph manuscripts with additions and corrections by [Vivaldi] are very common.” To me, this makes the act of composition sound collaborative. I can’t reach Talbot, now a retired professor in his 80s, but I begin a conversation with Nicolas Lockey, a Vivaldi scholar who has revised some of Talbot’s work. He warns me against getting overexcited. While Vivaldi might have used a variety of shortcuts to keep up with demand, Lockey thinks it unlikely any Pietà student helped in the creation of the pieces. “The governors would not have paid a contractor who didn’t complete the job himself,” he says. Plus, “as far as we know, Vivaldi was never employed to teach composition to the figlie di coro [students].” But my imagination is fizzing now, and I keep digging.
I learn that several of the orphans at the Pietà were composers in their own right, in addition to many being copyists. In the study Women and Music, researchers Yves Bessieres and Patricia Niedzwiecki describe the Pietà as a “nursery for the virtuosos who provided Vivaldi with his ‘musical material’”. They cite a letter from a Pietà student called Lavinia and write, “[Lavinia’s] cantatas, concertos and various works had to be composed in secret and in imitation of Vivaldi’s style.” But Lavinia wanted to compose her own pieces too. “The music of others is like words addressed to me; I must answer and hear the sound of my own voice,” Lavinia wrote. “And the more I hear that voice, the more I realise that the songs and sounds which are mine are different … Woe betide me should they find out.”
I speak with another scholar, Vanessa Tonelli, a leading expert on the female musicians of Venice. Is it possible that these girls helped Vivaldi compose his works? “Anna Maria certainly designed her own solo cadenzas for Vivaldi’s concertos,” she tells me. She explains that some partbooks that belonged to the girl musicians still exist, and that there are examples within these of notes and solo lines scribbled into the margins. “Musicians often improvised cadenzas, ornamentations, and other solo lines, and they occasionally jotted down their ideas for these improvisations.”
I imagine Anna Maria rushing back to her dormitory after class and furiously scribbling her notes on parchment. But this, sadly, is as far as my research gets me – particularly because many documents from the Pietà have been lost or destroyed by now. 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. I decide I can explore the question of whether these girls helped Vivaldi write his music through fiction. I can imagine into the gaps in our history. After more than 300 years, I can attempt to bring these remarkable women and girls into the light.
I take the hope, the ambition, the creativity and resilience of these women, and I weave it into The Instrumentalist. I write my novel knowing that, whether these girls helped Vivaldi write his music or not, they were fundamental to its creation. Without a collection of orphan girls who were destined to drown in the Venetian canals, we would not have the most famous piece of classical music in the world.