I had assumed it would be located in the dank backwaters of Venice. The Ospedale della Pietà – the orphanage where Antonio Vivaldi spent most of his career teaching music – I thought would be hidden away, lurking somewhere to the north of the island, somewhere tourists do not usually venture. I thought Venice would have been ashamed of it, and of the girls who grew up here.
It was a surprise, then, to walk just a few moments from St Mark’s Square and find myself facing an imposing building with green shuttered windows. I had to check Google Maps to make sure I was in the correct location. The Pietà, now the Hotel Metropole, looks proudly over the lagoon, occupying some of the most prestigious land mass in the world.
It was January 2022 when I first visited, in the depths of a winter still shadowed by the pandemic, although travel was finally allowed. Facemasks were to be worn on the streets and in the shops. The city was eerily quiet: my own footsteps followed me, echoing off the walls as I navigated the maze at night in search of a lost but tremendous true story.
Ospedale della Pietà... today, the Hotel Metropole
The Hotel Metropole was closed when I arrived, as were most other hotels in Venice, but I was desperate to get inside. I called daily but no one answered. I took to walking past every afternoon, peering through the locked gates and seeing if I could spy anyone sweeping the floors, dusting the tables, preparing to open. Finally, after about three weeks, I walked past one afternoon and the doors were flung wide. There was music coming from inside.
The PA to the general manager, an elegant woman called Silvia Calzavara, showed me around. She confirmed that this was indeed once an orphanage where girls were given a musical education, and that their teacher was Antonio Vivaldi, although the building has had quite the makeover since that era. The Metropole is now a five-star establishment where guests don Gucci bags and sip Campari spritzes, each cocktail complete with a skewered green olive drowning in the bitter red.
We made our way up onto the top floor and into one of the luxury suites with a terrace. I stood there, cool sun on my face, gulls cawing overhead, as St Mark’s Campanile began to chime. The sound was so loud it shivered through my chest.
I thanked Silvia for my tour and made my way back to the waterfront, trying to piece together my thoughts. This was not what I had imagined. It was not a cobbled-together solution to house a collection of unwanted girls. This was an establishment formed of wealth and power. I was staring at the prototype for the original conservatoire of music, and the setting of my novel.
When and why was the Ospedale della Pietà founded?
I began to research everything I could about the Pietà, and learned its story begins as far back as 1336, when it was founded as an institution to care for orphaned and abandoned girls. At the time, acute poverty, disease and gender bias meant that baby girls were being drowned in their hundreds in the Venetian canals. Boys, who were seen as more useful, were usually spared and put to work from a young age.
The idea of any kind of charity was a remarkably modern thought for the time, only possible because Venice enjoyed a particularly long period of political and economic stability. A government ruled – a mix of monarchy, oligarchy and democracy, rather than the church. It gave the citizens freedom, empathy and the chance to cultivate art like nowhere else.
Venice... a city of music
Because Venice was not just a wealthy place with educated inhabitants. It was also the Republic of Music. Venetians sang in the streets and on the canals, day and night. Shoeshines, knifegrinders and sailors all had their own tunes. Exploring the city must have been like stepping into a musical. The republic, and its fast-growing stream of international tourists, had a voracious appetite for performances and new music, and nowhere near the talent to meet the demand.
The answer of what to do with the large number of destitute girls growing up with little hope of marriage soon became obvious. Give them a musical education, the Venetians decided. They would contribute to society as composers, performers and copyists instead.
The Ospedale della Pietà... a world-famous centre of musical excellence
It went rather well. By the 18th century, the orchestra of the Pietà, known as the figlie di coro, was world famous. Kings and queens travelled from across Europe to see them. Wealthy aristocrats sent their children to the Pietà to learn from them. Superstars were born, like Chiara della Pietà, a violinist and soloist, Agata della Pietà, a composer and singer, and Anna Maria della Pietà, the girl that would become the lead character of my novel.
An orphan born in 1696, Anna Maria was recognised for her musical prowess by eight years old. She would go on to become an international celebrity and one of the greatest violinists of the 18th century. In 1739, French scholar Charles de Brosses suggested that, while she did not quite have the technical precision of the great Giuseppe Tartini, Anna Maria otherwise eclipsed him.
Disease and deformity... what was life like at the Ospedale della Pietà?
I was hungry to know what life must have been like for these orphan girls, who arrived at the Pietà by being posted through a hole in the wall when they were babies. Certainly, their musical education was a gift, and they were afforded opportunities most women could hardly have dreamed of. They earned money, they rubbed shoulders with elites, they were allowed to play instruments usually reserved for men. Yet life at the Pietà was not easy. Rousseau writes about the orphans in his Confessions, and says he was shocked to discover that the girls were disfigured by smallpox, that one was partly blind. ‘Scarcely one was without some considerable blemish,’ he concludes.
Because of this, and because the girls’ performances were deemed to be so angelic they might arouse men and entice them to sin, the orphans were often made to perform cloistered away from the rest of the world in galleries behind barred grills. I wondered how frustrating that must have been, to be heard but not seen.
Vivaldi joins the Ospedale della Pietà as master of music
Still, their musical reputations were exquisite, and an institution with this kind of talent began to catch the attention of established musicians. The most famous Venetian to join the Pietà as a member of staff was Vivaldi.
Vivaldi was a young man, early in his career as a violinist, when he won his role at the Pietà in 1703. He was to become their Master of Music. Working at the Pietà was a gift for a man with his ambition, not only because of the institution’s glowing reputation, but because, as Marc Pincherle writes in his book Vivaldi, Genius of the Baroque, ‘He held at his disposal a… laboratory of extensive and manifold musical resources.’
Vivaldi was required to compose endlessly; the Republic’s hunger for music placed a crushing demand on his time. But in his role at the Pietà he had a plethora of copyists to help meet demand. It’s possible these girls were even involved with composition. I started to imagine it like a moon landing. It’s one thing to have a desire to go to the moon, and quite another to have the resources to build a rocket and actually get there. Vivaldi had the resources.
The Ospedale della Pietà... birthplace of a new, exciting kind of music
With this breeding ground of talent, he and his students were able to invent music the likes of which had never been heard before. Audience members talked about how, ‘He placed his fingers at a hair’s breadth from the bridge so that there was hardly room for the bow,’ after they saw him perform during the Carnival of 1715. ‘He played thus on all four strings… at unbelievable speed… everyone was astonished.’
Audiences were startled by the twists, the turns, the sheer speed of Vivaldi’s music. It was in this innovative environment, with a collection of brilliant musicians by his side, that Vivaldi was able to crack out of the more restrained habits of Baroque and perfect a whole new form of music: the concerto. He would go on to spend most of his career at the Pietà and compose more than 770 works in his lifetime.
The sad demise of the Ospedale della Pietà
The Pietà and its famous orchestra enjoyed centuries of acclaim, but the party came to an end in 1797, when the republic fell to Napoleon and plans for the Ospedale changed. While it would remain an orphanage for some time, the focus on musical education faded. Still, the Pietà formalised the idea of an institution for musical education. It became an inspiration for musical conservatories that would go on to blossom around the world, including Venice’s Conservatorio di Musica Benedetto Marcello.
Today, one can still walk the narrow alleyway to the side of the Pietà building and stand at the place where the hole in the wall once was. I did so myself, imagining a mother placing her baby down and walking away, hoping desperately for a better life for her child. For hundreds of years, the Pietà girls’ names and stories have been forgotten, but things are beginning to change, especially because scholars agree that without the Pietà and the figlie di coro, Vivaldi’s music would not exist in the same form today.
We have a collection of disabled and disfigured orphans, destined to drown in the Venetian canals, to thank for the most famous classical piece on earth: The Four Seasons.
Harriet Constable’s The Instrumentalist is out now in paperback, published by Bloomsbury.
