The story of Anna Maria and her ambition to rise herself from poverty as an orphan of Venice to make music. Inspired by true events and throwing some doubt on the heritage of Vivaldi`s Four Seasons.

I really enjoyed this historical novel set in early 18th century Venice. The story of 8 year old Anna Maria - an orphan posted through the door of the orphanage - who has a gift for the violin and for composition and who is determined to shine!

But the odds are stacked against her as a female in a male dominated world - she must be selected for the orchestra, become first violinist and then be accepted as a maestro. Composing is a male domain so she must also break down this taboo.

This alongside growing up, surviving in the orphanage and learning the worth of herself and the value of friendships.

A feminist novel - it brings to life a little known character and shows the impact the orphans had on the musical life of Venice and the music of Vivaldi.

Absorbing and intruiging.

The Instrumentalist is a beautiful and fascinating piece of historical fiction based on the life story of a female violinst who studied under Vivaldi.

Baby Anna Maria is abandoned by at the gates of a prestigious orphanage and music school in Venice by her impoverished prostitute mother.

From an early age it becomes clear that Anna Maria has an incredible talent for music and she is destined to become part of the school's world famous orchestra, which brings in money to fund the orphanage.

Her talent is nurtured by the orphanage and she is given one to one lessons with the school's young, arrogant but intriguing music master.

Harrowing at times, the book highlights the struggles facing women in Venice at the time, across the classes. Even though her composing skills are on a par with (or perhaps better than) her music master, as a woman she isnt allowed to take credit for her work and she becomes frustrated and more determined. Can she realise her dream of becoming a famous female maestro?

I'm not sure how much truth/fact there is relating to Vivaldi. However, this is a really interesting story from an era that is rarely written about.

Venice in the 1700 a story of survival against all odds..and, apparently, inspired by a true story. it sounded good. Unfortunaley, for me,it wasn’t good. I found it let down my the writing…for example:


“Dusk, and the Marangona bell tolls in the Piazza San Marco. The chimes shiver out from the bronze mouth, glide over the domed roof of the Basilica, lick the cockles lining the mud-drenched canal and filter through a gap between pavement and wooden door. Behind it, a girl standing in a narrow, dimly lit passageway looks up.”

“At the Rialto fish market the gulls are insatiable. They swoop and sway, diving like pellets of hail toward the stalls, greedy for the last morsels of bream, the slithers of sardine. Shoppers duck, flinging hands over heads.”

Not for me, very disappointed.

Based around the true life of violinist Anna Maria who was taught by Antonio Vivaldi
Set in Venice, Anna soon catches the eye of the young music master at the orphanage where she lives and attains a place in his elite orchestra
It’s full of tension and ambition showing how the magic of music pushed her to be the best she could be
Well researched and perfect for any fan of historical retelling
Thanks #harrietconstable @bloomsburypublishing & @netgalley for the fabulous debut read

There are a lot of well employed classic historical gothic tropes expertly deployed in The Instrumentalist, not least the tantalising idea that musical history as we know it is all wrong. And it exploits both the lack of notable female composers in the 18th Century with the general idea of musical genius - see Mozart - that some people just have the gift. In early eighteenth century Venice let's take a well established arena for female musicians (trained orphan violinists), and have them intersect with a big name - here the Maestro Vivaldi. All this is real, Vivaldi wrote a number of pieces for Anna-Maria and as an instrumentalist - the highest accolade for a female musician - she was a major draw. Add to this some irregularities in Vivaldi's style, and there's certainly enough here to suggest that Anna-Maria might have written some of this music, and that she might have been smart enough to have a decent life once out of the orphanage.

We spend most of our time in The Instrumentalist with the orphans in the Ospedale della Pietà, and the book can rely on a broad understanding of the low level cruelty inherent in the regime of a female orphanage run by Nuns. One of the tricky aspects of the book is that we join the story and our heroine at a very young age, and there is a difficult balance with having a juvenile protagonist making decisions, to try and grasp the chil-like logic or petulance. She is a musical protege, wants to practice and play all the time, but also sees the other girls as competition and a threat, which is reciprocated. Add to this the workhouse style labour, the cruelty of the nuns and her new, extremely fickle music teacher, Constable still seems too eager to justify her actions in an adult way. Its understandable, though it makes some of her more questionable acts seem callous rather than the spiteful act of a child.

The Instrumentalist is a proper page-turner, and like good historical fiction, opens a window on a world we might not have seen before, or at least seen through male eyes. It plays with audience expectation in places (not least when it comes to Anna-Marie's true parentage), and can't completely rewrite history, though it is gleefully gung ho with its own theory, which is probably its greatest selling point.

We meet our protagonist – the real-life character of Anna Maria della Pietà – as a baby abandoned at the Pietà orphanage in Venice near the turn of the 18th century. The Pietà gave foundlings an education, and excelled in their music scholarship, with a famous all-female orchestra known as the Figlie di Coro.

Anna Maria knows from the moment that she picks up a violin that she was meant to play, and her visualisation of the music leads to her not only becoming extremely proficient at playing, but she also begins composing – something which is forbidden among the girls at the Pietà.

We then follow Anna Maria as she grows and prioritises what is most important in her life. While this is a fictionalised account of Anna Maria’s life, it was fascinating to learn more about Venice at this period, and how the Pietà operated. I was left a bit uncomfortable by the fact that Vivaldi wasn’t named, as well as the fact that is isn’t an established fact that he had help in his compositions at the time he worked at the Pietà, but as a work of fiction it is compelling.

My thanks to the author, NetGalley, and the publisher for the arc to review.

Anna Maria della Pieta is an orphan, passed through a hole in the wall of the Pieta as a baby she has known no other life. However, when she picks up a violin at age eight she finds her vocation. Able to see the colours of notes, she becomes a virtuoso, joining the famed convent orchestra and rising to become first violinist under her teacher, a renowned composer. Anna Maria can compose as well but when her teacher finds out he destroys her works and Anna Maria vows vengeance.
The character of Anna Maria is a real-life one, a maestro from 17th century Venice almost forgotten now. Her teacher, Antonio Vivaldi, is not named here and her story almost forgotten. Constable has woven a really engaging book around the scant facts and one with a bit of personality, Anna Maria is definitely no insipid orphan. A solid piece of work.

I really do love stories with a historical context, and this is set around the composer Vivaldi in the early 1700s – and the orphanage of young girls where he taught music.

Anna Maria feels herself destined for the greatness of ‘maestro’ status from an early age, and does everything to grasp every opportunity in what can be a vicious and bullying environment.

I loved the characters in this story, and the real feel for history – who knows how many women in history have been ignored because of their status, and this just demonstrates the possible.

A remarkable debut novel.

Why does this historical fiction about an actual historical figure have to be so heavy on the fiction that you wonder whether the actual historical person, Anna Maria della Pieta, is supposed to be a time traveller?

This could have been a wonderful read, but it was soured by the twenty-first century antics of the main character. Anna Maria's over the top believe in herself from very early in her life just didn't work for me. I couldn't fully immerse myself in the story and started skimming before the chapters reached the double digits.

I couldn't read this as an ebook for some reason so will get it when it comes out! Sorry! (Leaving a 4 star review to be fair.)

unfortunately, i found this pretty trite and repetitive. i can imagine lots of people enjoying this though - detailed and shimmery and nice enough to be appealing. a beach read. a book your mum reads in the bath.

Anna Maria della Pietà’s story is remarkable, and Harriet Constable does a commendable job bringing her to life. For me, historical fiction succeeds when it prompts me to dive into research, and this book does just that, focusing on Anna Maria's collaboration with Antonio Vivaldi. While the dialogue may be fictional, the essence of Anna Maria’s extraordinary talent shines through; she lived to 86 and captivated many with her music, while Vivaldi gained fame—perhaps because female composers often fade from public memory.

Anna Maria’s story is one of ambition and unwavering determination to succeed, highlighting the personal costs that accompany her relentless pursuit of greatness.

http://thesecretbookreview.co.uk

Not only the story of a young girl fighting all of a despicable sexist, misogynist European 19th century culture, housed in a Catholic home for orphans run by nightmarish nuns, but also the story of the musical genius residing in a young girls heart .. her reacher steals her compositions as his own and only through fierce combat does she get recognition. I
Despite this novels acclaim I just found the melodramatic drops all-too- familiar .. the girl friends in the v Convent school are inseparable too except when one disappears aftercare pregnancy (natch!) .. the worrying is fine enough, evocative and nuanced just ridden with 'mellerdrama'..

'On the horizon, Venice is a flat, silent land, the islands like discarded clothes floating on the skin of the sea. But as they draw closer, it changes shape. It is lifted into mountains of sound: the canals the strings, the islands the body; vibrating and melding, clanging and whistling; a giant instrument of a place.'

Harriet Constable’s debut novel ‘The Instrumentalist’ is audaciously colourful. It is a novel about synaesthesia, using as its vehicle the violin playing of the historical figure, Anna Maria della Pietà. Descriptions of her sound-as-colour synaesthetic experience of music are the most innovative and captivating passages in the novel; I think I could’ve read a whole book of just that, and been satisfied. As a backdrop and a foil to this colour, the eighteenth-century Venice of ‘The Instrumentalist’ is rendered often grim, even savage in its immediacy. Either way, purple passages of each form of description are why I kept on reading, when I repeatedly felt like giving up on the book.

Like ‘The Flames’ by Sophie Haydock a couple of years ago, ‘The Instrumentalist’ is one of those pieces of Historical Fiction based on the lives of real figures from history for which you have to discard aforeknown fact and suspend all disbelief, and I have to say, I found it as unconvincing as I did ‘The Flames’.

In a manner not dissimilar to Haydock’s representation of Egon Schiele’s relationships portrayed in that novel, the relationship between Anna Maria and her music teacher in ‘The Instrumentalist’ is uncomfortable to the point of problematic. Not just because it depicts a young girl’s suffering at the hands of her abuser, but rather because, in the character of Anna Maria della Pietà, Harriet Constable transposes a kind of prototypical twentieth-century or twenty-first century narrative onto the Seventeen Hundreds.

Constable’s Anna Maria, a young girl of prodigious talent and aspiration, certainly might have shined in a contemporary novel by Joanne Harris, say, or Kate Atkinson, where her sass and her zest could really spark as her rebellion against societal norms for pre-teen and teenage girls is explored and spun out. But, for this book, our protagonist is gratingly anachronistic, and it dulled the whole effect for me. An eight-year-old claiming that the death of an adoptive sister is a necessary sacrifice to achieve musical greatness? I really think Harriet Constable lost the run of herself a bit with this one!

My thanks to Bloomsbury Publishing Plc for the eARC.

Can you name a piece of classical music written by a woman? This is a sublime debut that transported me along the murky canals of Venice at the turn of the 1700s to the Ospadale della Pieta, an orphanage run by nuns. Abandoned baby girls are posted through a hole in the way every day. Anna Maria is one of hundred of girls to grow up in the Ospadele, but Anna Maria believes she is different. The Ospadele is famous for its musical groups, like a Venetian Vienna’s Boys Choir. Just with more confinement, corporal punishment and isolation. Pre-teen Anna crosses paths with a musician we know to this day, Vivaldi, a new teacher in the Ospadele. She is immediately drawn to the energy and passion that they share for the violin. Anna Maria has a natural ability to communicate through the violin and she matches this talent with an unbridled ambition to become a leading light on the European music stage. We journey through the maze of canals, seeing the tragic reality for so many of the women living there; their lives dependent on their bodies. The light this book so brightly shines on the disregard for a woman’s capabilities is hard to look away from. The pacing is slow with the characters gradually revealing their depths. Anna Maria is at times unlikeable but deeply understandable in her actions given the direction she receives from those guiding her. It’s an important reminder of the centuries/millenia that women have existed without recognition for their talents. The Instrumentalist looks at the army of women who made Vivaldi who he was. I’lll never be able to listen to the Four Seasons without thinking of Anna Maria and the other remarkable women who’s names have largely been forgotten. The structure reminds me of a concerto - a dramatic, memorable opening, a lyrical and slower paced middle section, with a rousing and heart racing finale. This debut novel should be a must reader for any lover of historical fiction or classical music. Thanks so much to Bloomsbury publishing for an advance copy in exchange for an honest review. Easily one of my favourite books this year.

I have read this ARC with a view to providing a review
All opinions and thoughts are my own

A new author to me
I must admit it was the stunning cover that drew me in

This didn't disappoint

Loved it

This was a beautifully written piece of historical fiction based on a true story of which I previously knew nothing about & I'm so glad I now know about it.

Beautifully almost lyrical writing in a stunning setting with wonderfully characters and a story of hope and resistant.

Would highly recommend.

What a lively and interesting approach to the famous music of Vivaldi.
As a violinist I was already aware of the Ospedale della Pieta where unwanted babies were left and if they were musical, were trained to an extraordinarily high standard. The orchestra of the Pieta was famous and will always be remembered – by anyone who knows of Vivaldi anyway. And given the period and the social mores of the time, it’s a given that those young women and children were exploited.
So this story is about one of those young women who fought to make her own life from her music with both the help and the obstruction of Antonio Vivaldi. And it really works – the writing is perfect for the story and leads to an understanding of just how much those children risked and achieved and how close was the danger of a fall into the worst kind of poverty – for women – the kind where you cannot keep your children or yourself. The writer doesn’t hesitate to show both the worst and the best that could happen to a musician, depending on their skill and circumstances and their charisma.
The music and the realities of different kinds of life are brilliantly juxtaposed without ever losing the continuity of this particular story. It’s really very well done. I loved it and I recommend it both for the (well researched) historical insight and the story of Anna Maria.

Anna Maria della Pieta was born in 1696, but her mother couldn't keep her so she posted her through a wall of an orphanage in Venice. The girls in that orphanage were all given music lessons and Anna learnt the violin.

Anna was a real person who became a great violinist taught by the composer Antonio Vivaldi, this is a fictionalised account of her life. It was absolutely spell binding.