The Instrumentalist reinterprets the life of an orphaned girl turned master violinist in 18th-century Venice

In 1696, a Venetian sex worker deposits her newborn in a small hole in the wall of the Ospedale della Pietà, an orphanage where nuns shelter unwanted girls who may otherwise have been drowned in the canals. The Pietà has a music school, and the baby, named Anna Maria, grows up to become its orchestra’s star violinist under the tutelage of maestro Antonio Vivaldi.

Constable’s debut is a passionate reimagining of Anna Maria’s story—and much of it must necessarily be reimagined. As with other artistic women from history, her work remains shadowy, and although Vivaldi wrote concertos for her, her specific contributions to his oeuvre are unknown.

Anna Maria burns with ambition. At eight, she knows she’s “destined for greatness,” and insists that her teacher guide her in honing her ferocious talents. She develops close friendships with other girls but casts them aside; her music demands full attention. In short, she’s a diva-in-training, and Constable urges readers to consider not only what it takes for women to succeed in a repressive era, but also what this single-minded drive takes away from them. Anna Maria is a synesthete who sees music in color, and these passages (“it trembles and fragments before her eyes… a thousand shades of gold and auburn and maroon”) immerse the reader in swirls of brilliant sound and images.

As Anna Maria uses Vivaldi (who’s never named as such) to pursue her goals, her teacher is also using her. “I am a composer. Instrumentalists are forgotten,” he tells her, and her original compositions are stolen and subsumed into his. The story over-relies on binary extremes such as this, and her petulance and self-entitlement feel very modern. Fortunately, the concluding chapters show greater emotional subtlety. You may come away from this novel unsure if you’ve met the real Anna Maria, but it has a sweep and urgency that’s hard to resist.

The Instrumentalist was published by Simon & Schuster (US) and Bloomsbury (UK), and I reviewed it initially for November's Historical Novels Review.  This isn't the first novel about Vivaldi and the violin school at the Ospedale della Pietà; others include Laurel Corona's The Four Seasons, Barbara Quick's Vivaldi's Virgins, and Alyssa Palombo's The Violinist of Venice. Read more about the author's writing process in her article for The Guardian.