During the winter of 2020, I lived in Venice. One of my abiding memories was walking alone across Piazza San Marco to take a Covid test. The square was empty, practically silent; I could hear my footsteps echo around the colonnade. In the absence of tourists, the city acquired a spookily muted sonic landscape. You found yourself craving music, whether it was the singing congregation at Sunday mass, or the snaking scales that floated down from the Conservatory windows. Those snippets of song seemed celestial: they represented a revived city with concert halls and applauding audiences – a richer life than this grim curtailment.
Venice has cultivated some of Europe’s most celebrated musicians, and it’s within this illustrious scene that Harriet Constable’s glittering debut, The Instrumentalist, unfolds. Set in the early 18th century, the novel follows a brilliant female violinist, an orphan by the name of Anna Maria della Pietà. The Ospedale della Pietà was a real-life female orphanage that, somewhat surprisingly, boasted a renowned orchestra of performers. Many of these women emerged from low-born lives, and often lived with disabilities and deformities, yet went on to achieve glory and (brief) fame throughout the Republic and beyond.
Their long-standing tutor was one Antonio Vivaldi, the chap who wrote The Four Seasons. Or at least, we attribute it to him. Fascinatingly, Constable’s novel explores how members of the Figlie orchestra composed music that Vivaldi often presented as his own. During his leadership, he nurtures the great talents of Anna Maria, his prized pupil. “I created you,” he preens – but he becomes increasingly hostile when her talents outpace his own.
One of this novel’s great pleasures is how snugly Constable sits in the ear of a musical prodigy. A synaesthetic, Anna Maria “had notes before she had words, and those notes always had colours”. When she plays, “her invented notes pulsate, flowing from her body into shades of blue, green and gold.” But Anna Maria is all ear, no foresight. Closeted life in the orphanage leaves her ignorant of the stark realities of life for women on the outside, let alone those who dare to dream of becoming Maestro.
As her reputation grows, Anna Maria still trusts her increasingly jealous tutor, allowing him to read her own work. Riven with envy, he starts to destroy her compositions and undermine her performances. Inevitable, perhaps; not a unique tale, certainly; but in Constable’s tachycardiac performance scenes, we share Anna Maria’s heartbreak when the much-adored tutor betrays her.
This novel about music is fundamentally about silence; the myriad ways in which female authorship has been erased. Constable is strongest in this darker territory, veering away from the cuter depictions of orphan life in Venice – the pinafores, the music practice, the dormitory whispers, which sometimes feel trite – and wading into the Republic’s more sinister waters. In a startlingly panoramic sequence, she follows its inhabitants on a given morning: a baby girl is drowned in the dank canal and “the sediment does not ripple”. Later, the girl’s mother goes to work at the lace factory on Burano, stitching a work of great beauty.
As she ventures further into Venice, Anna-Maria confronts this abyss, and how quickly unmarried women can be sucked under. During a lively scene at Café Florian, a brilliantly unpleasant Casanova encapsulates the entitlement of those Anna Maria is up against when he gropes a woman’s thigh during her musical performance. “It’s my birthday,” he protests, smirking, when rebuked. Still, the young prodigy’s performance stupefies the crowd, her body “swaying as it chases the hues and the shades”.
Constable’s novel never feels heavy on its historic details; instead, they’re weaved into a captivating narrative that’s as tightly tuned as a thriller. Her account is a heartening tribute to a group of formidable women who, in real life, often had to play behind curtains for fear of inciting too much passion in the male audience. And yet, as we read in an author’s note, they were considered “too intelligent to marry by many of the men of Venice”. (Vivaldi, meanwhile, flees the city with a 13-year-old violinist in tow. Nice look, maestro.) In confident style, Constable draws the figlie players out from behind the curtain, and allows us to revel in their scores once more
The Instrumentalist is published by Bloomsbury at £16.99. To order your copy for £14.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
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