SSurprisingly, this story begins in Palo Alto, California. It’s summer 2019, and my partner and I live in a rented apartment—one with fake houseplants and self-help books lining the shelves. Tech bros jog by, decked out in Lululemon. It’s not the place I expect to discover a detail that will change the course of my life.
And yet one day I take the next book off the shelf and start leafing through it. I come across a line about an orphanage in Venice. It says that Antonio Vivaldi taught there and that his students became the greatest musicians of the 18th century. I almost knock over the plastic aloe vera. I have been a journalist for ten years, searching for untold true stories about remarkable women, and I come from a musical family. The music of the greats – Bach, Mozart, Vivaldi – was the soundtrack of my upbringing. Why have I never heard of it?
I start researching. I learn that the orphanage was founded, among other things, because illegitimate babies were being drowned in the Venetian canals. I learn that the girls at the Ospedale della Pietà were allowed to play instruments that were normally reserved for men; that they earned money for their performances and mingled with kings and queens. “What makes the Pietà so famous,” wrote the Saxon Prince Friedrich Christian after seeing it played in 1704, “is not only that all the instrumentalists are really excellent musicians, but … that all the instruments are played by women, without there being a single man in the ensemble.”
I learn that Vivaldi spent almost his entire career at the Pietà and composed most of his pieces there. But among the hundreds of girls and women who studied there, one name keeps cropping up: Anna Maria della Pietà. She was a talented violinist and Vivaldi’s favorite student. He composed many pieces just for her. In this experimental environment, with a wealth of talented female musicians to try out ideas with, and Anna Maria by his side, Vivaldi was able to perfect a whole new form of music: the concerto, most famously realized in his Four Seasons. I wonder: is it possible that these girls helped Vivaldi compose his work?
After a few months, I have a vivid daydream: I’m following a young woman down a long stone corridor lit by flickering candles. She holds a shiny violin and a bow beside her. I want her to turn around, look at me, say something. But the woman accelerates and starts running. I know this is Anna Maria. But how does it feel to be her? How important was she to Vivaldi’s creations?
Discovering the real Anna Maria becomes my obsession. One autumn I read in the British Library that she was often singled out by her audiences. In 1739, the French politician Charles de Brosses described her talent as “unrivalled”. A poem written in 1740 said of Anna Maria: “There is no one in the whole world who can equal her… neither man nor woman.” How did a girl who was a penniless orphan become the greatest violinist of the 18th century? I learn that it had everything to do with being born in this special republic. The Republic of Music.
In the 15th and 16th centuries, when Venice was facing high rates of infanticide, plague, and famine, it developed a social policy that included responsibility for foundlings. Orphans were taken in at the Ospedale della Pietà. According to Jane L. Baldauf-Berdes, author of Women Musicians of Venice, this move was “unprecedented in history.” This charity was possible because Venice had enjoyed centuries of economic and political stability. In place of the church, a government—a mix of monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy—ruled. It gave citizens freedom, empathy, and the opportunity to cultivate art like nowhere else.
In his book Vivaldi: Genius of the Baroque, Marc Pincherle, wrote that in the 18th century, there was “a mania for music” in the Republic. Day and night, Venetians sang in the streets and canals, and each guild had its own tune. “There was neither a time nor a place when there was no music.” Orphan boys could be put to work from a young age, but what to do with the many orphan girls? The Venetians decided to give them a musical education. To teach them instruments. To learn to copy and compose music themselves. The Pietà gave rise to generations of women with extraordinary musical talent. Women with superstar careers, women who were ambitious, competitive and determined. Women who could not only perform but create.
Their teacher, Antonio Vivaldi, was a remarkable musician and composer who amazed his audiences. “He placed his fingers just a hair’s breadth from the bridge, leaving hardly any room for the bow,” writes a spectator who saw him perform during the Carnival of 1715. “He played like that on all four strings… with incredible speed… everyone was amazed.” But the Republic’s obsession with music placed an enormous burden on Vivaldi’s time. He had to compose endlessly, not only for the orchestra but also for outside clients. Vivaldi worked with several copyists to meet demand—including women and girls from the Pietà. One of them was Anna Maria.
“A copyist was often asked to assemble an apparently new work from fragments of earlier works,” writes Michael Talbot in his book Vivaldi. Manuscripts “in hands other than (Vivaldi’s) and non-autograph manuscripts with additions and corrections by (Vivaldi) are very common.” To me, this sounds like collaborative composition. I can’t reach Talbot, now a professor emeritus in his eighties, but I start a conversation with Nicolas Lockey, a Vivaldi scholar who has revised some of Talbot’s works. He cautions me against getting too excited. Although Vivaldi may have used a variety of shortcuts to keep up with demand, Lockey thinks it unlikely that a Pietà student had a hand in creating the pieces. “The school administration would not have paid a contractor who didn’t do the work himself,” he says. Moreover, “as far as we know, Vivaldi was never commissioned to compose for the Coral figures (Students).“ But my imagination is now bubbling, and I keep digging.
I learn that several of the orphans of the Pietà were themselves composers, and many of them were also copyists. In the study In their book Women and Music, researchers Yves Bessieres and Patricia Niedzwiecki describe the Pietà as “the nursery of the virtuosos who provided Vivaldi with his ‘musical material.'” Quoting a letter from a Pietà student named Lavinia, they write: “(Lavinia’s) cantatas, concertos and various works had to be composed in secret and in imitation of Vivaldi’s style.” But Lavinia also wanted to compose her own pieces. “The music of others is like words addressed to me; I must respond and hear the sound of my own voice,” wrote Lavinia. “And the more I hear that voice, the more I realize that the songs and sounds that are mine are different… Woe is me if they find out.”
I speak to 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 belonging to the musicians still exist and that they contain examples of notes and solo lines scribbled in the margins. “Musicians often improvised cadenzas, ornaments and other solo lines and occasionally wrote down their ideas for these improvisations.”
I imagine Anna Maria rushing back to her room after class, furiously scribbling her notes on parchment. But unfortunately, my research hasn’t gotten me any further – especially since many of the documents from the Pietà have since been lost or destroyed. I still feel there might be more to the story. The ingredients are just too compelling: enormous talent and ambition, plus an endless demand for new music, plus the fact that we have erased or degraded the role of women in art in general. I decide to investigate whether these girls helped Vivaldi write his music through their fiction. I can imagine the gaps in our history. After more than 300 years, I can try to bring these remarkable women and girls to light.
I take the hope, ambition, creativity and resilience of these women and weave them into The Instrumentalist. I am writing my novel knowing that these girls, whether they helped Vivaldi write his music or not, were fundamental to its creation. Without a collection of orphan girls destined to drown in the Venetian canals, we would not have the most famous piece of classical music in the world.
