Plays fast and loose with biographies, generally with besmirching effects

Unfortunately I did not really enjoy this. Constable’s style is a little overwritten and repetitive. The idea of making her central character, Anna Maria della Pieta, the musical prodigy, violinist and composer synaesthetic was an excellent one – except that there is then an endless repetition along the lines of this music being red and yellow, that music being orange and green and then dark blue, etc etc.

But my major dislike of this book was two-fold. I always have trouble with fictionalised accounts of the lives of real people when the writer plays fast and loose with events from their lives – and particularly where malpractice of some kind is invented.

Anna Maria della Pieta was a real person, and the existence of the Venetian orphanage Ospedale della Pietà, in which she was initially a foundling, and later a member of the famous orchestra of foundling girls, who then became a star, famous beyond her geography, as a virtuoso. A ‘Maestra’, she was then to become the teacher and orchestra/choir coach for the orchestra. No mean feat for a woman in the eighteenth century.

Constable takes this story, and from it, she carefully never names the priest who was the Maestro di violin and Maestro di coro who trained all the girls at the time when Anna Maria was a small child, but it is absolutely obvious that this is Vivaldi, because she uses his history. Presumably the reason she doesn’t name him is because of the perfidious accusations she makes and ascribes to him.

Sure, this was not the easiest of times for a woman composer to get her work known and recognised. The fact that in teaching music and composition to the girls may indeed have meant that some of the works in the prodigious number of concerts and new works Vivaldi was having to produce with the orchestra, were collaborations, does not therefore mean that some of the particularly heinous events happened.

In the Victorian Era, hagiographies of famous people, brushing their malpractices away and out of sight were the norm. Unfortunately, our century seems prone to the other side – dirt digging, or inventing malfeasance, fake news, if you like

Thank eNetGalley and Bloomsbury Publishing for this eCopy to review

The Instrumentalist is a richly crafted fictional bebut. The story revolves around Anna Maria della Pietà, an orphaned girl born in Venice in 1696. From her humble beginnings in an orphanage to her rise as a celebrated violinist and composer, Anna Maria’s journey is captivating. However Anna Maria’s success came at great personal cost and I never really warmed to her. Her relationship with Vivaldi was complex and I felt quite sorry for her at times

I also found parts of the novel repetitive and slow-paced.

Despite this, The Instrumentalist remains a compelling exploration of ego, legacy, and the limitations placed upon talented women in history.

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This book has glorious Venice, Vivaldi, and Music - so it's off to a good start. And there's much to recommend about The Instrumentalist - it's an easy and fascinating read about an extraordinary woman. The book is a fictionalised history that tells the story of a young virtuoso violinist (Anna Maria della Pietà) who lived in Venice in the early 18th Century.
At the Ospedale della Pietà, abandoned orphan girls are posted through a tiny gap in the wall every day. Anna Maria is one of the three hundred girls growing up within the Pietà's walls – but she already knows she is different. Obsessive and gifted, she is on a mission to become Venice’s greatest violinist and composer.
The book is well-written, the story is compelling and there's much to enjoy as we're taken along on Anna Maria's journey.
My only reservations are that it sometimes feels like C21st attitudes and behaviours have been transplanted to C18th Venice which can feel jarring. I also struggle a little when real people such as Anna Maria and Vivaldi are fictionalised and reimagined to this extent, although in Anna Maria's case perhaps that's better than being almost entirely forgotten.
Anyway, it's a good summer read, especially if you're lucky enough to be travelling to Venice.
With thanks to the publishers and NetGalley for an ARC.

A truly well written book, focusing on the life of Anna Maria della Pieta but also giving voices to the other girls in the Pieta The Instrumentalist brings Venice in the eighteenth century to life in full colour.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for allowing me to read The Instrumentalist.

This summer, I have read two books about forgotten women in history. The first was Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in a Woman of Opinion and last week I read about Anna Maria della Pietà, a musical prodigy raised in an orphanage in Venice in the 1700s. She worked with Vivaldi and possibly contributed (without credit) to his most well known works and her story is told in the debut novel, The Instrumentalist.
We first meet Anna Maria as a baby being left at the Ospedale della Pietà, an orphanage that many destitute pregnant women used to give their daughters a chance. There the girls were raised to learn musical instruments and for those with talent it offered an opportunity to perform for some of the wealthiest members of Venetian society. Anna Maria has an incredible talent and aptitude, she is able to see musical patterns in colour and quickly rises through the ranks of the orchestra. She is also fiercely determined, almost arrogant in her dealings with others and is soon singled out by Vivaldi, the teacher of the elite musicians to work on his new compositions. She believes that she is as talented as the maestro, composing herself and fighting to be recognised as an equal.
I had never considered the part women have played in the history of music and little is known of Anna Maria as her history is not recognised in the same way as Vivaldi’s. At times, I found Anna Maria hard to like perhaps because of her single minded attitude. Her relationship with Vivaldi was complex and the abuse of power was not dissimilar to modern day grooming. This did not stop me enjoying her story and the author has put so much into her research of Venice in the 18th century and the role of the Della Pietà orphanage. The imagery that is created of the juxtaposition of the wealth and squalor of Venetian society with the descriptions of sights and sounds create a clear image for the reader. I’ve never been to Venice, but it is high on my travel wish list and I would love to wander the streets where Anna Maria perfected her craft and dazzled the nobility of society at that time.

I was swept away into Anna Maria’s Venice. A harsh world where a girl’s survival depends firstly on being small enough to fit into a small hole in the wall of an orphanage, secondly on having outrageous talent for music and thirdly on being prepared to allow the patriarchy to rob you of the recognition of that talent.

Anna Maria may be a flawed hero in this story but you get it: you will her to succeed and you understand her difficult choices and sacrifices to do that.

Ultimately, Constable offers representation for women in a world and a time when they had very little, so that their talent can be reclaimed and celebrated.

Passion, colour, triumph leap energetically from every page – I ‘heard’ the music, felt Anna Marie’s intensity, ‘saw’ the colours when she and her violin were one. The pace was tremendous, the historical and social information splendid and embellishing – ‘The Instrumentalist’ captures an era where women were not intended to succeed, despite their talent. Harriet Constable also encapsulates how women support each other – even when feared they are competition. Wonderful detail and atmosphere of Venice as it must have been then. An enthralling read.

When I was a small child living in Washington DC, I had a story tape called Vivaldi’s Ring of Mystery. These tapes were produced by the company Classical Kids to introduce small children to classical music, and subscribed to by middle-class mothers like mine – I think we had ones on Handel and Mozart as well. Although this tape has passed into the mists of time and we will now never know whether it was a work of brilliance or a load of rubbish, it has always stayed with me. I remember the story of an orphan girl living with nuns in Venice who had grown up hearing the legend of a special violin that only one heir could play. In the climactic scene, she rose from an audience of orphans to reveal herself as the lost genius. (There was also a very scary scene in the cemetery on Isola di San Michele). While I may have messed up some of these details – where does the titular ‘ring of mystery’ come in? – the sheer atmosphere and the music made this story unforgettable for my seven-year-old self.

And then we have Harriet Constable’s debut novel, The Instrumentalist. As Bridget Jones would say: GAH.

I am very much not a fan of faux-feminist historical fiction that feels the only way to celebrate the lives of women is to make them behave exactly like twenty-first century protagonists and/or to tear down famous men. This has the unfortunate result of erasing the struggles and machinations of women who did not have the same mindsets that we do but achieved within the boundaries that were set for them. It also suggests that the only way women can be talented is if men are abusive fakes. (See also: Odysseus in Madeline Miller’s Circe). Obviously, I am all for historical fiction that shows that these men were flawed individuals and not idealised heroes, but this kind of your-idol-has-feet-of-clay approach never feels feminist to me.

The Instrumentalist doubles down. It’s based on the real life of Anna Maria della Pietà, an orphan growing up in the Ospedale della Pietà in Venice after being abandoned there as a baby at the very end of the seventeenth century. By the early eighteenth century, both she and her fellow orphans were being tutored in music by Antonio Vivaldi, who became master of violin at the Ospedale in 1703. Vivaldi composed most of his major works while he was at the Ospedale, and also wrote a lot of music for the figlie di coro, the student orchestra. Anna Maria would go on to have a long and successful career in her own right, being named ‘Maestra’ at the age of just twenty-four and composing and performing throughout her life until her death in 1782, when she was in her eighties.

This is irresistible material, and it’s not surprising that Constable was drawn to it – Anna Maria della Pietà has already inspired at least one other historical novel, Barbara Quick’s Vivaldi’s Virgins. But The Instrumentalist doesn’t work in any way at all. Anna Maria herself is a big problem. I liked the idea that, growing up in the Ospedale, she might gradually perceive that the only option for her other than a forced marriage would be entry into the figlie di coro, and so set her sights on a place in the orchestra. Constable takes it too far, however, giving Anna Maria fierce artistic ambition from the start, which feels as inauthentic as much of the rest of the historical detail in this novel. Anna Maria ‘offers a cool professional smile’ to Vivaldi as an impoverished teenage orphan girl at a time when the very idea of being ‘professional’ would make little sense. She wants to get into the figlie two years early because otherwise ‘she will be average, normal’ – what on earth does this even mean in the early modern period? I’m very relaxed about writers playing with modern language and concepts in historical fiction if they know what they’re doing (see: Lauren Groff’s Matrix), but Constable’s choices just weaken her story.

It gets worse. Anna Maria is intensely difficult to like. I actually appreciated that Constable made her so single-minded that she becomes a bit ruthless. This rings more true for her background and situation than would generosity and solidarity. But she’s a terrible cliche, somebody who can pick up a violin and just knows how to play, who is unable to fail unless there’s some external intervention like a broken finger. Then there’s what the narrative does to Vivaldi. Constable seems to feel that she can’t foreground Anna Maria without tearing him down. She strongly implies that he sexually assaults and rapes the girls, shows him destroying Anna Maria’s work, and she also makes Anna Maria a crucial part of the composition of both La stravaganza and the Four Seasons. This is a historical nonsense. Writing for the Guardian, Constable outright admits that all the Vivaldi experts she spoke to told her that Vivaldi did not compose with the girls of the figlie, but ‘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.’ So, basically, she wanted it to be true so she made it up. I just don’t think this is OK. Vivaldi himself was also hardly privileged; he was born poor, with health problems, and died in poverty, believing his music had been forgotten.

On top of all this... The Instrumentalist is very badly written. It has an incredible setting but no atmosphere whatsoever, thanks to vague writing like this: 'At the edge of the promenade, where hefty wooden pillars shoot up and gondoliers tie their boats, merchants have laid rugs and wares. There are spices and silk cloths and salts and carved woods, feathers and carnival masks and cottons and coloured wools. And then there is the wonder on the faces of those stepping on to shore. Venice is made from moments like this: starry-eyed dreamers first touching foot to land... Every step is a movement, every beat marks a change'. It's repetitive, melodramatic, and although she has some musical training, Constable tells us nothing at all about learning or playing the violin. Anna Maria is given synaesthesia, a device I thoroughly hate in fiction, and here it seems to be used to evade descriptions, so every violin piece is written like this: 'She is away, chasing reds and blues, tumbling with the speed of the greens and greys'. We get no sense at all of the actual music. This is such a shame, because I still so want to read the novel this promised to be. Maybe, despite that title, I'll just have to check out Vivaldi's Virgins.

Beautifully written book. Vivid portrayal of Anna Maria della Pieta, fantastic descriptions. The use of colour was fabulous.

This is a book of fiction based on real life characters of the seventeenth and eighteenth century Venice.
In 1696 Anna Marie della Pietà was posted through a small hole in the wall of the Ospedale della Pietà orphanage. She grew up there amongst around three hundred other children. Raised by the nuns.
At the age of eight Anna Maria’s talent of the violin had started to shine through. Her music teacher was Antonio Vivaldi.

Fiesty and ambitious Anna Maria is determined to go far, music is her life, her world.
It was an interesting book and I liked how the story was woven around the real life characters by the author.
I was unaware of Anna Maria and the orphanage and the daughters of the choir, so reading the acknowledgments at the end, and doing some further online research after finishing the book has enlightened myself. I have learned a little more about Anna Maria and some of the other girls.
I really enjoyed reading this debut from Harriet Constable, and look forward to reading any future books.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Publisher for an advanced e-book copy. Opinions about the book are entirely my own.

A beautiful, evocative read and illuminates the background of Vivaldi's time and music so well.

Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC

Babies left through the tiny doorway in the Ospedale della Pietà in a Venice of 1696, are those now alone in the world. They are the offspring of whores, the poor or young unmarried girls, servants whose masters had used them. Whatever their beginnings, they are unwanted or unaffordable. This had been the fate of Anna Maria della Pietà, like the other abandoned babies, she was left with a momento from her whore mother, along with the promise to return. Instead her delicate shin had been branded with a P by the nuns who will now care for her. This is her remarkable story.
As she grew Anna Maria together with her friends dreamt of a life of fame, a life where music was her world for she has within her a huge talent. She knows this. It drives her insatiable ambition. It becomes all she wants, even at the expense of her friends, her found family.
Of all the instruments Anna Maria plays, it's the violin she has an uncanny affinity with, it feels a part of her. She sees it in colours where others see music. It's with the violin she will make her name. That and her maestro....Vivaldi.

It's filled with the imagery of colours and sounds, it's a feast of emotions. Within is a story of a young girl growing to womanhood. It's a tale of ambition, manipulation and vengeance, and a celebration of a girls relationship with her music, her teacher and her friends. Like a wonderful piece of music, it builds and builds to a magnificent ending..

Suse

Beautifully written historical fiction.
The author captures the sheer passion and devotion of Anna Maria an orphan, who becomes a great violinist and composer and the struggles she encountered. The attitudes of the time - Venice in the 1700's are clearly portrayed. I was horrified to read of how the unwanted babies were pushed through a gap in the wall at the orphanage and if a mother kept her baby too long and it could no longer be pushed through, it was sadly left outside, not taken in and died.
The music master at the orphanage initially encourages Anna Maria, but when she wishes to compose, he will not allow her name to be shown. A rather cruel at times, and toxic man. If a pupil upset him, he would have them removed from the orchestra, and their fate then would be to have a husband chosen for them.
Useful notes at the back of the book from the author.
Highly recommend. Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for the ARC.

A debut novel of historical fiction but based on real people and real facts. The V story of Vivaldi, Venice and violins. A gentle tale and quick read. Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the chance to ARC this book.

The Instrumentalist is a beautiful book. It follows the story of Anna Maria who lives in an orphanage in Venice where girls train to try and join their famous orchestra.

The orphanage and the characters are based on real people, Anna Maria's teacher is the famous composer Vivaldi who taught for many years at the orphanage.

The book at some times does feel a little over descriptive however the author does a good job in painting a full and vivd picture of Anna Maria's life.

Overall the books message about the women lost to history was one I really enjoyed.

I'm torn with this one. Whilst it was fascinating and very illuminating, Anna Maria is not portrayed as a very likeable person. I knew nothing of Ospedal della Pieta nor the connection to Vivaldi, so that was a very informative thing to read about. It took me a while to figure out that Anna Maria was real and with such immense talent. I'm glad I read it but I'm not sure I enjoyed it.

This was an interesting historical fiction from the perspective of one orphan who was the protege of Vivaldi. It was fascinating seeing from her perspective what it took to become a musician and to be a girl in those times.

The fictionalised story of a violinist erased from history, orphan Anna Maria della Pieta, the muse of Vivaldi. A highly accomplished debut that sweeps you into Venice in the early 1700s, with an inventive take on ambition, desire and empowerment. Literary historical fiction at its finest.

This story of Anna Maria della Pietà is extraordinary as it is, but Harriet Constable did a very good job portraying her. For me, historical fiction based on the lives of real people is a success when I spend a lot of time reading Wikipedia (or other sources) to see what really happened and what not. It’s clear that the whole book is about Anna Maria and Antonio Vivaldi, and the way they worked together for years. It’s also clear that none of the things they say to each other in the book, is true.
What is true is that she was an extraordinary gifted person and since she reached a respectable age (she reached the age of 86) many, many people in those days enjoyed her music and her concerts. Vivaldi became even more famous – maybe not because his music was more beautiful but because female composers tend to be forgotten sooner by the big public.
I just loved the book because of Anna Maria’s synaesthesia and the way the author used this to give (literally) more colour to the story. I like to listen to music while I read so the choice what to listen to while reading this book was not a difficult one.
I’ve read in several reviews that Anna Maria is not a very likable person. Indeed, she’s not al soft and friendly and polite all the time. But what do we know? We know almost nothing about her life except from her music. I think it’s a bold choice to portray her as very fierce, sometimes cold and unfriendly; what life would she have lived if she didn’t come up for herself? Still, nowadays women who are fierce and strong and know what they want to reach for themselves in life are called cold and altogether unlikable. So nothing new there – and a great pity because I think the author did a lot of research and painted a believable portrait of Anna Maria.