SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi has been famed for centuries. Anna Maria della Pieta has not. A new novel, she is the musician behind Vivaldi's more enduring works, including "The Four Seasons."
(SOUNDBITE OF ANTONIO VIVALDI'S "THE FOUR SEASONS")
SIMON: Harriet Constable's debut novel is "The Instrumentalist" - begins in Venice around 1695 as the infant Anna Maria is abandoned by her mother, who was a prostitute outside, of a girl's orphanage called de Pieta (ph), and that's where she gets her name, della Pieta. The orphanage has an elite orchestra, and as Anna Maria grows up, so does her musical talent. She catches the ear of Antonio Vivaldi, and later she becomes a violin virtuoso.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SIMON: Harriet Constable joins us now from London. Thanks so much for being with us.
HARRIET CONSTABLE: Thank you so much for having me.
SIMON: How did you learn about Anna Maria della Pieta?
CONSTABLE: I discovered her story by accident. It was in a book in a rental apartment that I was staying in one summer, and I plucked it off the shelf and started flicking through absent-mindedly. And there, somewhere in the middle, was this line about Antonio Vivaldi. It said that he had taught in an orphanage in Venice for his entire career, pretty much, and that his students had been all female, and that without them, his music could not have been created. And I was completely captivated because I come from a musical family. I was surprised I had never heard of them.
SIMON: And this Venetian orphanage, Ospedale della Pieta, is a real place with a tough and remarkable history, isn't it?
CONSTABLE: That's right. It existed for hundreds of years. Anna Maria lived there at the turn of the 18th century. Baby girls were unwanted and deemed not useful to society in the period. So many baby girls were being drowned in the Venetian canals. And as a way of saving them, they thought, let's create this orphanage and give them a musical education because Venice had such a hunger and excitement for music in the period. They thought this could be a way to sort of put them to good use.
SIMON: How much of your novel is history, and how much is artistic imagination?
CONSTABLE: Well, I was able to discover some delicious facts, which I've tagged the plot to. So I could find out that Anna Maria was Antonio Vivaldi's favorite student, that he purchased a violin for her, that he composed music just for her. I could find out things like when Anna Maria was posted into the Ospedale della Pieta and remarkable things like she went on to eclipse even the great Giuseppe Tartini. But I couldn't find out what it felt like for Anna Maria. What was it like to play the music? What was it like to be there in the republic of music in its most exciting period? And that's where I let my imagination take precedent.
SIMON: And in your novel, Anna Maria has a condition that she sees colors when hearing sounds, doesn't she?
CONSTABLE: This was one of the pieces of imagination. I wanted the classical music in "The Instrumentalist" to be a treat to read about, and I wanted, in a way, to express the beauty of Anna Maria's genuine creative genius mind that she absolutely did have. And I thought synesthesia could be a way to do that, by giving the music color, physically seeing it sort of erupt and lift up from the sounds of Venice and seeing her tug it to the page as she composes would be a way of expressing that the music was the light in her otherwise quite dark and treacherous life.
SIMON: And what does music represent to Anna Maria?
CONSTABLE: Well, she and the girls of the pieta lived a pretty tough existence. They had two choices - save themselves with music or be married off to a man they've never met, or put to work in the laundry or the lace work or something that they didn't want to do. This knife edge between glory and the abyss determined their lives, and so music gave them these remarkable opportunities to earn money and have careers, to rub shoulders with kings and queens. It was so important to them to make it as musicians.
SIMON: What should we make of Vivaldi?
CONSTABLE: Vivaldi was a remarkable musician. He was exciting and innovative in his time. He was also a controversial character, even in his time. He caused controversy for taking a student out of school, a teenage girl, who moved in with him. So even in a period in which power and control over women was more acceptable, the levels of power and control that he demonstrated were unpalatable even for his time. And that is an important thing to know about him.
SIMON: It does raise the question, who's the mentor and who's the student, in a way, doesn't it?
CONSTABLE: The power dynamics of this story, I think, are so fascinating because, yes, on the one hand, Vivaldi is a man, and Anna Maria is a girl. He's the teacher. She's the student. But music changes things because she has this prodigal talent, and when that talent threatens to eclipse the mentor, when the music takes over, that power gets challenged, and who actually is in control is interesting. It's something I've really enjoyed exploring in the book.
SIMON: She ends up sacrificing a lot, doesn't she?
CONSTABLE: She has a difficult set of choices, I think, to make, because she has these orphan sisters that she's growing up with, and they're her only sense of family. But these girls were being raised in a brutal sort of environment. I mean, we know that they were missing eyes and toes and scarred from the pox. They also are in a competitive environment, which I think would have been very complicated. Do they save themselves, or do they save one another? There are only so many places at the top. And this would make decisions around friendships or success very toxic.
SIMON: And your novel and this whole story does make us contemplate how many creative powers are in our history like Anna Maria, who have not been recognized, whose contributions we don't know.
CONSTABLE: I think it's such an exciting time because there's so much still to discover. Our history is not finished. It's not complete. It's our best interpretation to date, and great pieces of art that we still value today are almost never created in silos. They're created as a, you know, sort of collaborative environment. And that's very much the case for this music.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
CONSTABLE: Music in the period was exploding in a way it had never done before. This shift from baroque to the concerto was so exciting, so different. That was only possible because Vivaldi had this test bed to iterate and invent with - these women and girls. And that's why this music is so good.
CONSTABLE: It's why we still love it today. That story enriches our understanding of our history.
SIMON: Harriet Constable, your new novel, "The Instrumentalist." Thank you so much for being with us.
CONSTABLE: Thank you so much for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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