The Instrumentalist - Harriet Constable
I received an advanced reading copy of this book from Bloomsbury via NetGalley.
After reading a lot of SFF this year I wanted a change of pace, and an historical fiction novel about one of Vivaldi's protégés and her rise to become a maestra di violino. Anna Maria della Pietà has fascinated me for a long time, largely because we know so little about her life and her works, so the premise of The Instrumentalist attracted me immediately.
Here's the blurb:
A dazzling historical debut set in eighteenth-century Venice, about the woman written out of the story of one of history's greatest musical masterpieces
Venice. 1704. In this city of glittering splendour, desperation and destitution are never far away. At the Ospedale della Pietà, abandoned orphan girls are posted every through a tiny gap in the wall every day.
Eight-year-old Anna Maria is just 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, and in her remarkable world of colour and sound, it seems like nothing with stop her.
But the odds are stacked against an orphan girl – so when the maestro selects her as his star pupil, Anna Maria knows she must do everything in power to please this difficult, brilliant man. But as Anna Maria’s star rises, threatening to eclipse that of her mentor, the dream she has so single-mindedly pursued is thrown into peril…
From the jewelled palaces of Venice to its mud-licked canals, this is a story of one woman’s irrepressible ambition and rise to the top, of loss and triumph, and of who we choose to remember and leave behind on the path to success.
Initially I really enjoyed this. The writing is strong and Venice is painted in vibrant brush strokes that really bring the setting to life. Anna Maria's childhood at the orphanage and her discovery of the violin were compelling and her burgeoning relationship with Vivaldi (who is never actually named in the novel after an Introductory note explaining who her tutor is) gripped me.
Unfortunately my initial love for the book was short-lived. Because this was a review copy I felt more of an obligation to continue reading to the end than I normally would, but had that not been the case I think I would have DNFd at around the halfway mark. There were a few things that irritated me early on that I was happy to ignore, but as the book progressed I found them more and more bothersome. Despite the blurb stating that "the odds are stacked against" Anna Maria, there's never really any sense that she struggles to achieve anything. The story is a fairly linear sequence of events in which Anna Maria wants something, gets it, is abrasive and horrible to the people around her, and is then forgiven because she's brilliant. This formula repeats fairly regularly, and the lack of any real dramatic tension makes it hard to want to keep turning the page.
One of the main challenges in writing historical fiction is balancing the history - the things we know to be true - with the fiction in order to craft a compelling narrative. That's especially difficult with a figure like Anna Maria della Pietà, about whom very little is known. In the author's note Constable acknowledges that she has moved some events around "for dramatic purposes", but I found that the manner in which this was done actually took away from what the book was trying to acheive.
There are a couple of instances in particular where I find the shuffling around of events and characters to stray away from artistic license and into the realm of historical revisionism. The first is in the character of Chiara. In real life Chiara della Pietà was a student of Anna Maria's born nearly 20 years after the maestra and taught by her. In the novel she becomes a peer and a rival, someone who Anna Maria contends with for a place in the orchestra and who later betrays Anna Maria's trust to Vivaldi. Given that the novel is explicitly concerned with the way women are erased from history, this felt like a betrayal of an historical figure who should be remembered alongside Anna Maria as a virtuoso in her own right, rather than rewritten as a villain.
This criticism also extends to the treatment of Vivaldi in the novel and, in particular, the way in which Anna Maria's contributions to his music are portrayed. It's almost certainly a fact that the women of the Ospedale della Pietà worked closely with Vivaldi and helped write his music, often without any credit, but Constable takes this a step further, giving full credit to Anna Maria for both La stravaganza and the Four Seasons. La stravaganza was written in 1712, when Anna Maria was around 16 years old. The provenance of Vivaldi's Four Seasons is not entirely clear but it's likely that they were composed during a period when Vivaldi was the court chapel master in Mantua in around 1718-1720, not when he was in Venice in roughly 1711 (which is when this section of the novel takes place).
It's this painting of Anna Maria as the driving force behind all of Vivaldi's success and fame that feels a little disingenuous. The novel is very much exploring the fact that women's lives and accomplishments are very often minimised, and Anna Maria della Pietà is a great example of this given that her works are not readily accessible in the present day. It's not outside the realms of possibility that she did co-write with Vivaldi and it's a matter of fact that Vivaldi wrote many of his works for the women of the Pietà to perform, and I suspect license has been taken to extend that to La Stravaganza and the Four Seasons purely because they're the most well-known of Vivaldi's works for most people, but personally I felt like the desire to insert Anna Maria into all of Vivaldi's work lessened the point. By the time the Four Seasons were published Anna Maria had already been dubbed "Maestra" (at the age of 24, rather than 17 as she is in the novel). For the narrative to want to so directly link her to Vivaldi's greatest work at the expense of highlighting own accomplishments seems to actually be diminishing her rather than achieving the author's aim.
This desire to paint Vivaldi out of his own life comes to a head in the final third of the book, which is less about celebrating the brilliance of Anna Maria and the other women of the orphanage that it is about demonising and tearing down the character of Vivaldi. He's painted as almost abusive, stealing Anna Maria's life's work and burning her compositions in front of a class of younger students. Perhaps the attempt here is to invert the idea of women being written out of history, to make us feel uncomfortable about the treatment of Vivaldi here in the hope that it will cause us to reflect on the way women are treated in historical records, but if that's the case I don't think it succeeds particularly well. Rather than providing an opportunity for reflection it instead feels mean-spirited, and it lends a sour note to what should be a celebration of the brilliance of Anna Maria.
The author's note opens with the statement that The Instrumentalist is "a work of fiction inspired by true events from the life of Anna Maria della Pietà". I think that I would have enjoyed this more had it not been marketed as historical fiction. If the real names had been stripped out and this was purely a work of fantasy then the muddling up of historical details and the anachronistic characterisation, with every character reading like they've stepped straight out of the 21st century, wouldn't be issues. There would still have been the problem of Anna Maria always seeming to get what she wants without issue, but I think I would have been more forgiving of that had I not expected that I was reading about the life of a real person who succeeded against very real odds.
With all this criticism it probably seems like I hated this book, which isn't the case. I liked it a lot more at the beginning than I did at the end, and the thought definitely crossed my mind about halfway through that perhaps I didn't want to finish it, but on reflection I enjoyed it more than I didn't. I wouldn't be in a rush to re-read it, and if the author continues to write in historical genres then I'm not sure I would continue to read her work since I like my historical fiction to be more grounded in the actual history, but if her next book were instead a work of pure fiction I would definitely pick it up.