The Instrumentalist by Harriet Constable
Well, September is shaping up to be quite the month for excellent historical fiction releases. Our Book of the Month, as you’ve hopefully already seen, is a wonderful look at authorship and women throughout history from Jodi Picoult… and the debut chosen by our team of debut choosers this month is a similarly affecting and thought-provoking tale of a woman with enormous talent and ambition – this time set in the elite world of classical music. While BOTM By Any Other Name namechecks one of history’s most venerated authors, this one involves one the 18th century’s most virtuosic composers. And so, we give you The Instrumentalist, Harriet Constable’s dazzling debut. Why not make them a double bill? Words and music, after all, go so inextricably well together.
In the present day, it is still difficult but not impossible to come from humble beginnings and still to achieve a degree of artistic success. In the 18th century however not only was this exponentially more improbable but the phrase humble beginnings often meant something more extreme.
The Instrumentalist begins in the early 1700s, in Venice – a city of stunning opulence and artistic mastery, but a city, too, of desperate straits. One of the city’s most well-known charitable institutions, a hospice, orphanage and music school called the Ospedale della Pietà has a single, tiny window through which abandoned infants are posted every day. The life of an orphaned child left here might never be a happy one, but a life at the Pietà is preferable to dying in the gutter… and a gifted and unusual girl who finds herself with its walls might just find the opportunity to reach for something much more.
Anna Maria is just one of hundreds of girls growing up as an impoverished ward of the Pietà. Like most of the girls taken in by the school, she receives rigorous musical training and is expected to perform concerts of sacred music for visiting audiences. But Anna Maria, by the age of eight, already knows that she is destined for greater things. Showing an unusual aptitude for the violin, and an obsessive need to develop her gifts, she dreams of becoming nothing less than the most celebrated violinist and composer that Venice has ever seen. Her world is one solely made of colour and sound, and nothing but music matters. But there are floors to scrub, and cruelties to endure and, from the all-encompassing walls of the Pieta, escape could only be a foolish dream.
And then comes Antonio Vivaldi. And Vivaldi, the virtuoso with a reputation for harshness and merciless tutelage, knows that it is not enough to just play an instrument, no matter how well one might play it: only composers can achieve immortality. He notices Anna Maria’s talent immediately and chooses her as his protégé. It’s not an easy position to fill as he expects brilliance and is famously ungenerous with both praise and compassion. But Anna Maria, unlike the other girls, does not bother herself with emotions and grievances; music is her world as there is room for little else. She quickly realises that to get where she is determinedly going, she will need to secure his approval… and later will need to take his job and become Master of Music herself. Vivaldi, on the other hand, like so many prominent men, will not permit the rising star of some abandoned child to threaten his own eminence.
Thus begins a lucid and dramatic tale of feuding ambitions that moves from the visceral poverty of muddy lanes and pitiless institutions to the sparking heights of prominent palaces and artistic deathlessness.
Inspired by real events and unsparing in its colourful detail, The Instrumentalist is a book that examines the enduring and timely challenges of womanhood, aspiration and ego just as surely as it transports you back in time to the severe and luminous realities of one of Europe’s greatest cities.