Vivaldi's Virgins, page 25
The maestro just left me. He looked more worn than I have ever seen him look, even during those times when he’s afflicted by his breathing difficulties and chest pains. At first I thought it must be his excitement over the success in Verona of his latest opera. That and the rumors that he will not be allowed in Ferrara this Carnival season. It seems that certain cardinals there are none too happy about the Red Priest’s activities as an opera patron and impresario.
It is, of course, all because of Anna Girò. The Church does not take kindly to priests who are rumored to travel with their mistresses and never say Mass—although he has always protested that he doesn’t say Mass only because he doesn’t have the breath for it. I think he doesn’t have the time for it, either, what with everything else he tries to do.
He seemed feverish to me, and as if he’d been suffering from lack of sleep. I offered him a glass of wine and we drank together. I saw he had something to tell me, but I never would have guessed—or perhaps I would have, if I’d thought about it properly. After all, his story is my story as well.
He paced back and forth between my desk and the window, started speaking, and then interrupted himself with several observations about trivial things that I knew had nothing to do with what he wanted to say. I was meanwhile looking over the piece of music he had given me.
“You wear glasses now, Annina?”
“Yes, for reading. But only when the light is low.”
He sat down, and I poured him another glass. Outside my window, the sun was setting over the Canal. “I will always think of you as a young girl, far too young for reading glasses.”
“Then you are living in a dream, dear Maestro.”
“Yes, I suppose I am.” He drank—he drank it all down in one gulp, I noticed, and then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I want to ask your advice.”
“Indeed, Maestro. You know you can trust me.”
“Precisely. I know I can entrust you with my secret. And I know of no one better suited to help me decide. It is a question of enormous delicacy.”
I got up and cracked the door open to make sure there was no one lingering and listening in the hallway. “We are safe here, Sir, and I will help you if I can.”
“It is about Signorina Girò.”
This, of course, came as no surprise to me, but I have to admit that I found the situation more than a little uncomfortable. As much as I have always valued the marks of distinction Vivaldi has shown me, I did not relish the idea of being his confidante in this matter.
“I have erred greatly, Anna Maria.”
“Hush, Sir! I think you had better speak to your Confessor than to me.”
He shook his head and, much to my horror, started weeping. “Who but you can understand?”
Did he know my secret? I was too stunned to reply.
“I am a sinner, but my sin is not that for which I have been blamed!”
“You confound me, Maestro.”
He looked exasperated. “You’ve heard the rumors, surely!” I nodded. “And you’ve seen my Anna.”
What did he want from me? I hated hearing him call her “his” Anna.
“You don’t believe them, do you? Please, Anna Maria—tell me you don’t believe it’s true! It would be an abomination.”
“I do not mean to sound cynical, Sir. But it no longer shocks me to hear of a priest who has broken his vows of celibacy.”
“Only once, and that over two decades ago. May I have some more wine, please?”
“I think I’d better have some more myself. I’m utterly confused now.”
He took his refilled glass and drained it, again, in one go. “I do not know how I can speak more plainly. Anna Girò is my daughter.”
Priests! Surely it was not God’s idea to throw His anointed into such hypocrisy.
“I only learned of her existence a decade ago. I have been trying to make amends ever since. And yet these rumors hound us. These evil rumors!”
I thought of my own father and his prolific career. “Does she know?”
He shook his head. “How can I tell her? How will she feel when she learns that I am not only her teacher and protector but also her father—I, an ordained priest?”
“I have misjudged you!”
“Everyone has.”
We looked at each other in silence, and then he looked away from me. “Shall I be remembered as a lecher—I who have lived in probity among virgins all these years? You know the sort of man I am, Anna Maria. I have lived for music, and I have faithfully served both God and the Republic. Does not an entire lifetime of musical achievement weigh more in the scales of justice than a single night of indiscretion in Mantua?”
“I do not know, Maestro. But I am sure that your music will never be forgotten.”
His eyes were overflowing again. “I wanted to ensure that someone knows besides myself, in case something happens to me. But I don’t want Anna to learn the truth before the time is right for her. She must feel safe enough, and strong enough. And she must know that I would have given up all of it—my fame, my gold, my reputation—for love of her.”
I advised him—I urged him—to tell her the truth without delay. I’d had enough pain in my own life over having the truth kept from me.
But all he could do was shake his head and pull at his hair—now faded to a pale gingery gray. “She will hate me for it. At least now, she is fond of me, and I can be near her. Oh, my love for her robs me even of my hope of salvation! How can I feel remorse for bringing her into the world?”
Yes, he was right to come to me, although he refused to heed my advice.
All I could give him, in the end, was my promise to tell no one but Anna, and only after Vivaldi is dead, if he dies before me.
My poor maestro! I will keep my promise to him. It is the very least I can do, considering everything he has done for me.
I have come to understand how complex a thing the truth can be, as well as the companionability of a well-kept secret, protected and nurtured till the time is right for its unmasking.
La Befana’s influence here has been durable and strong. Though I have been teaching these many years, I was only elected maestra this past August—and, by the same vote, Maestra di Coro. It would not have happened if Maestra Meneghina still held sway.
I was never made a scrivana, and would never take that job, in any case. The libri della scaffetta would be open books to all the foundlings were I in charge of them.
But there is another book of secrets for which I am both the guardian and the scribe.
For many years, this book resided in a locked desk in my room. It started life as a blank book—vellum pages caught between gilded leather covers. It was a present from my grandmother, one of two such books she gave me.
Both are nearly filled now, although this one I filled very quickly over the course of these past few weeks since my promotion.
The other I have been filling slowly ever since my return to the coro so many years ago.
It is a second Golden Book for Venezia—not filled with the names of every noble family, but inscribed with a list of ignoble deeds. The girls know to come to me whenever they have been misused by her. When I reached the last page, I knew the time had come.
I gave it to Marietta and she gave it to my grandfather, who presented it at the governors’ meeting.
A truly good teacher can mean the difference between a happy life and a tragic one. A truly good teacher can see the hidden light in eyes that may seem hooded to the rest of the world and even to him or her who possesses them.
But evil teachers—those who derive joy from inflicting harm, who want others to suffer because they themselves have suffered—deserve to be punished, not only in the next world, but in this one as well.
Elena has just poked her head in at the door.
When I looked up from my writing—in that first moment before my eyes had adjusted—I thought it was Giulietta. They have the same smile. And of course, Elena is the same age as Giulietta was when I saw her for the last time.
“Zietta,” she said, “I’m ready for my lesson. How beautiful you look in this light!”
We both looked out through the window, my window over the bacino, where the late afternoon light, golden-hued, was pouring through like a blessing.
Elena has been in my care since the age of three. I could not love her more if she were my own daughter. She works hard, too—and she’s a very talented violinist. I keep wondering if she’ll find a way to continue, once she’s left here. Her parents have planned all along for her to marry. I know she will be a credit to them, and to me as well.
I smiled at her and said, “Give me five minutes to finish what I’m doing, figlia mia.”
I’ve lit the lamp for these last words and Elena’s lesson. I’ve filled every page in this book now—and I think I’ve said everything I needed to say. Holy Mother of God, I beseech you to preserve these papers from fire, flood, and decay. I’ve written the entire story here. I was writing it even when I thought it was my own story, and not Vivaldi’s as well. All that remains for the truth to come out is the passage of time. Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.
Anno Domini 1737
Venezia
HISTORICAL NOTE
BECAUSE OF THE SCANDALS that dogged his name, Antonio Vivaldi became persona non grata in Venice, the city he loved so well. He was indeed undone by his love for Anna Girò, although I think I am the first to suggest that she might have been his daughter rather than his paramour. No one has yet determined the true nature of that relationship.
The Red Priest died at the age of sixty-three in July 1741 in Vienna, where he was buried in a pauper’s grave (coincidentally, the young Joseph Haydn was one of his pallbearers).
Vivaldi’s music immediately fell into utter obscurity for nearly two hundred years. If he was mentioned at all in books about Venice, or even in musical histories of Venice, published before the 1930s, it was as “a freakish violinist and eccentric cleric” rather than as a composer (Michael Talbot, Vivaldi). The rehabilitation of his music began, albeit slowly, when scholars recognized the direct and profound influence of Vivaldi’s compositions on the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Little by little, and sometimes by great leaps, the Red Priest’s prodigious body of both secular and sacred music is being brought to life again.
New scores by Vivaldi are still being discovered, and much of his music remains to be recorded. Many of the exquisite choral works he composed for the Pietà, from around 1713 until 1739, have recently become available on compact disc from Hyperion Records Limited of London, England. I listened to these sans cesse while writing this novel, except when I was studying the music played by Anna Maria and her mates in the coro.
Since the explosion of his popularity in the 1960s, Vivaldi’s resurrection has been nothing short of spectacular. His Four Seasons is now the most widely played and most recognizable piece in the classical music canon.
Bonaventura Spada was indeed a priest-musician who taught at the Pietà during the period in which I’ve placed him there. But very little else is known about him. The active love life I’ve made up for him is entirely a novelist’s fancy—although priests of the time did, without doubt, father children.
There were four different internal violin teachers at the Pietà named Meneghina, one of whom “was stripped of her privileges and permanently demoted to the status of a figlia del comun on June 9, 1752, for maltreating a child in her care” (M. White, Biographical Notes).
I made up the story about Tiepolo and Giulietta, although similar tales have been in circulation about love affairs between Venetian painters and cloistered musicians of the ospedali.
An actual young man named Franz Horneck was in Venice during the time described, procuring scores for the Archbishop of Mainz and enjoying himself (we have a traveler’s account of this) as much as possible. He was an avid student of the violin, and it seems that at some point he may have copied scores for Vivaldi. There is no historical record of a relationship between Franz Horneck and Anna Maria.
Indeed, we have only the merest biographical sketch containing the main events in Anna Maria’s highly successful musical life (and that thanks to the tireless research of Micky White). The only facts that are even vaguely personal in White’s compilation are that Anna Maria was put on a special diet (of chicken) on January 23, 1728, and was granted two extra measures of oil weekly on October 7, 1729.
We know from the accounts of many contemporaneous observers that Anna Maria was celebrated far beyond the boundaries of Venice as a consummate musician who mastered many other instruments in addition to the violin, and was a credit to the Pietà throughout her career. That she also may have been a bit of a scofflaw was suggested to me by the fact that her promotions lagged far behind and came much later than those of her peers.
Anna Maria enjoyed the unusually good health and longevity that seem to have been a special privilege of the figlie di coro, who always had sufficient food and medical care close at hand. She lived to be eighty-six years old in a century in which the average life expectancy in Europe was around thirty-five.
Some sixteen years after Anna Maria’s death, in 1797, Napoleon’s army walked into Venice without any resistance from the once-mighty defenders of la Serenissima. With Napoleon’s signing of the Treaty of Campo Formio, Venice became part of the Austrian-held kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia.
The Venetian tradition of wearing masks during Carnival—recorded as early as the mid-thirteenth century—was brought to an end with the fall of the Republic. It was not until the 1970s that some of the traditional mask designs were put into production again, and a much shorter but no less showy version of Carnival was revived.
The original Church of the Pietà, on the Riva degli Schiavoni, was torn down in the 1740s—during Anna Maria’s lifetime and after Vivaldi’s death—to make way for the present-day magnificent Palladian structure designed by Giorgio Massari. Even in the “new” church, though, one gets a very good sense of how the members of the coro must have looked, half-hidden and half-revealed, behind the lacy metal grillwork of the choir lofts.
The buildings that housed the foundlings of the Pietà are still standing, hidden behind a gate, just across from the Hotel Metropôle (in the lobby of which one can see two pillars from the original church). The well and the courtyard, the vaulted windows of the room where the governors met, and the original water gate are all intact and very evocative of the cloistered world where the foundlings of the Ospedale della Pietà played and sang the music that kept la Serenissima in God’s good graces.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Try as I might to make this book historically accurate, it is, by design, a work of literary fiction. Some small fragments of conversation between historical personages depicted here came to me by way of historians and memoirists of the time. The rest are the product of my own imagination.
—BQ
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Micky White, an independent scholar and resident of Venice who has dedicated her life for decades now to seeking out the history of Vivaldi and the figlie di coro of the Ospedale della Pietà, is in the process of writing a monograph about Anna Maria, to be published with the sponsorship the Istituto Italiano Antonio Vivaldi at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini. I am enormously indebted to her for the work she has done so far and her kindness in meeting with me, despite her inherent distrust of novelists. Micky quite literally opened the door to the Pietà for me, so that I could see it with my own eyes.
Dr. Francesco Fanna, director of the above-named institute, has been the soul of kindness and generosity, sending me photocopies of hard-to-get articles, letting me use his Internet connection to e-mail work in progress to my editor until I figured out how to do it on my own in Venice, and listening with graciousness both to my odd theories and my very imperfect Italian. Vivaldi scholar Giuseppe Ellero was similarly helpful in guiding me back on the path when I became distracted with a highly evocative tidbit I found on the Internet having to do (as it turned out) with another Anna Maria of the Pietà.
This book would not have been possible had I not been able to refer to the meticulous scholarship of those who have studied and written about eighteenth-century Venice. Dr. Michael Talbot, Alsop Professor of Music at Liverpool University and a Fellow of the British Academy, is the ultimate authority on Vivaldi’s life and work. I am indebted as well to the long-out-of-date historical effusion, so chock-full of juicy details, written by Philippe Monnier. The works by the late Jane L. Baldauf-Berdes as well as Micky White’s “Biographical Notes on the ‘Figlie di coro,’” all cited in the bibliography, were my constant companions during the composition of this novel.
Laura McCreery shared her academic staff member access to the magnificent University of California Library, which allowed me to have all the rare volumes of research I needed at my fingertips for a full year. I was saved from numerous misspellings and grammatical mistakes, as well as given a great deal of encouragement, by the Italian journalist Caterina Belloni. Violinist Vivian Warkentin’s insider’s knowledge afforded some wonderful details I would never have come up with on my own. Lutenist and Vivaldi afficionado Howard Kadis and his colleague, Nadja Matisoff, at “The Musical Offering,” provided invaluable help with the discography.
Marcus Grant’s insightful suggestions at an early stage of the writing proved to be spot on. Judy McKay was my cheering squad, while her husband and my writing buddy, Matthew McKay, gave me untold hours of free therapy. Liz Stonehill, a great reader, was the first person I entrusted with the final manuscript.
I am grateful to the producer and writer Ron Levinson for his enthusiasm and belief in this novel when the project was at its earliest stages. Cedric Shackleton made it his business to get me to Venice so that I could begin writing the story that had been chasing me for more than a decade.
