Time to curl up with a thrilling read
Fall’s here! Bright leaves, spice lattes, pumpkins—and Tempesta di Mare’s big Hidden Virtuosas program. What better way to bring the Virtuosas home than to curl up with a hot drink and a thrilling read about the woman musicians of Venice?
Indulge yourself! There are plenty of ospedali novels to tempt you. Storytellers have flocked to the ospedali story for decades (ospedali is the Italian name for the charitable institutions who took the Virtuosas in). At least five novels about the ospedali girls and women have come out since 1992 and they’re all still in print and guaranteed to divert, if not move and delight. There’s a play/audiobook for children available to stream, too. And a terrific BBC documentary. See list below.
There’s nothing hidden about why the story attracts writers. Even the few facts known about the Hidden Virtuosas offer up a ripping yarn: pitiful orphans rescued; girls and women performing behind barriers with Europe’s wildest playground right outside; celebrity composers; fanship; fame.
Celebrity, Fanship & Fame
Writers rise to it like a greedy trout to a fly, clearly delighted by the opportunity to go deep into the inner lives of these amazing women, create the scenes we yearn to see and bring the worlds in which they lived back to life. There’s plenty of enjoyment to be had in the ospedali novels.
Trigger warning, though: these books are works of fiction—and genre fiction at that. The ospedali writers know the devil is in the details, and much of the strength of their work comes from how skillfully they illuminate the historical record. But as fiction writers, they really do have full latitude to embroider, expand or even set aside the historical record as they wish. And they take that permission and run with it.
In fact, over thirty years, the ospedale stories have developed their own history of more-or-less fabricated facts —a canon, if you will. They almost all follow a fixed set of tropes. For instance, the protagonist in almost all of them is a girl or young woman raised from birth at one of the four ospedali, usually the Ospedale della Pietà (which is the best known). She’s almost always a foundling embarked on a quest to discover her birth identity. She has prodigious musical talent and she suffers the self-doubt and setbacks that plague artists. She is also filled with joy and self-actualization in the act of creation, specifically the creation of stellar High Baroque music. She has a streak of rebellion. She gathers a circle of friends and protectors, a “found family,” that helps her find her way through the challenges that confront her.
Enter: the fictional Antonio Vivaldi
And she is almost always pitted against a major antagonist in the form of famous baroque composer and virtuoso violinist Antonio Vivaldi. Oh, writers have such a wonderful time with their fictional Antonio Vivaldis. He’s the strutting rooster in the ospidali henhouse. He’s the bigger than life figure who enchants our heroine, who supports her, who defends and champions her, who frustrates, mistreats, betrays and otherwise raises heck with her and her dreams and aspirations—in some novels more, others less. He’s the first crush. He’s the fairy-tale prince. He’s the bad boyfriend. He’s the very bad faculty advisor, especially when his student writes The Four Seasons and he passes it off as his own (fiction, remember?). To be fair, he also experiences redemption. Or at least come-uppance.
Yes, the Vivaldis can be a bit much, but if you can take them with a grain of salt, the books are full of pleasures. We get masterful views of the sordid side of our heroines’ amazing city as they traverse the darkest canals and grittiest back alleys. We go along with them as they experience the obstreperous audiences and attention-grabbing divas in commercial theaters and we follow them gape-mouthed through the glittering pleasure palaces of the ultra-rich.
We get served up some unforgettable scenes. In Harriet Constable’s The Instrumentalist, for instance, our heroine, rushing off to an evening rehearsal, passes the window where women abandon their babies and in the shadows finds a newborn—as she herself had been left—alone and helpless to the ospidale’s care, still marked with the bloodstains and vernix of birth. In Vivaldi’s Virgins, Barbara Quick delivers dead-on details in her protagonist’s delightfully wry, humorous voice, such as the teenage girls in the coro who stick fake beauty marks on their faces so that they look like fancy society ladies when they perform, even though nobody can see them through the grilles.
And there’s Laurel Corona’s brilliant choice, in The Four Seasons, to follow two protagonists, sisters, one who stays at the Ospedale and becomes a maestra and the other who marries out into wealth and power. Corona weaves and intercuts the alternating trajectories of their lives as they survive and thrive with dignity and personal satisfaction in very different worlds with dignity and personal satisfaction—gifts, it’s implied, of their upbringing and a credit to the amazing institutions that nurtured them. Such excellent plotting, such a touching bond, such well-drawn characters. I hated to leave them behind when I finished the book and closed the cover (well, shut the e-book).
I’m a pretty tough nut but reader, I wept.
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Fiction
The Ospedale novels (list probably incomplete): Rosalind Laker, The Venetian Mask (Doubleday, 1992); Barbara Quick, Vivaldi’s Virgins (Harper, 2007); Laurel Corona, The Four Seasons, (Hyperion, 2008); Harriet Constable, The Instrumentalist (Bloomsbury, 2024); Julia Fine, Maddalena and the Dark: A Novel (Flatiron Books, 2024). Disclosure: I just discovered Maddalena and the Dark, can’t wait to read it!
Audio play: Douglas Cowling and Susan Hammond, Vivaldi’s Ring of Mystery (Classical Kids Music Education, 1991). CD, audiobook, frequently performed live on orchestral children’s programs, streaming on Spotify and Google Play Books and probably elsewhere
Documentary
“Vivaldi’s Women” (BBC FOUR, 2006). With members of the Oxford Girls’ Choir and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, leader Nadja Zwiener, musical director Richard Vendome (watch on YouTube). Research assistance provided by Micky White, who also provides research assistance to Hidden Virtuosos.
Non-fiction
Micky White, Antonio Vivaldi: A Life In Documents (Leo S.Olschki Editore, 2013). Available in libraries.
Vanessa Tonelli, “Figlie del Coro: Women’s Education and Performance at the Venetian Ospedali, 1670-1740,” dissertation, Northwestern University, 2022. https://arch.library.northwestern.edu/concern/generic_works/2n49t214x. Vanessa Tonelli provides research assistance to Hidden Virtuosos.
Cheat sheet
If you’re nerd like me, even if you like historical fiction—and I do!—you can’t help but ask while reading it, “Wow, Is this really true?” or, at points, “Yikes! This can’t be true, can it?”. For us, here is a cheat sheet that gives a quick outline of the facts known about the Venetian Ospedali:
Some of the finest instrumentalists and vocalists in baroque Europe were indeed abandoned as infants to four centuries-old charitable institutions for the sick and destitute in Venice: the Ospedale della Pietà, the Ospedale degl’ Incurabili, the Ospedaletto dei Derelitti, and the Ospedale dei Mendicanti. As they grew, girls with musical ability were talent-spotted and moved into the ospedali’s specialized schools of music, which were staffed and run by former Ospedale wards who trained the girls and young women to high levels of musical proficiency and performance. In the late 17th and 18th centuries, the institution’s governors also brought in outside male professionals like Vivaldi to compose extra music for the ospidali’s popular concerts and services and coach players in the most up-to-date practices so their ensembles could compete with the best professional ensembles elsewhere. These included Antonio Vivaldi at the Pietà, but also many other performers and composers at all for institutions.
As adults, the women faced two very different possible futures. They might stay at the ospidali and continue to teach and play and further their musical careers which meant, though, that they could not start their own families. Or they could leave, in which case the institutions would require them to give up performing in public ever—essentially, a non-compete clause.
And that’s the truth.
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Anne Schuster Hunter is a writer and art historian living in Philadelphia, www.anneschusterhunter.com.
