Beyond these details, little is known about della Pietà’s life. Though she was a renowned musician during her time, she was eventually forgotten. With “The Instrumentalist,” Constable fills in the gaps, giving this remarkable figure the kind of nuanced origin story that has rarely been afforded by history to female artists.
The book opens with della Pietà as baby Anna Maria, and right away Constable sets up the first glimmers of her relentless character. In a harrowing scene, her teenage mother, a sex worker lost in a daze of postpartum anguish, attempts to drown herself and her child. The baby, Constable writes, “is a raging firestorm of a thing, and she cannot hold it back.” Anna Maria’s fervor causes her mother to change course and drop the baby off at an orphanage instead of killing her.
With only harsh, overworked nuns as her parental figures, Anna Maria turns to the orphanage’s music teacher, Vivaldi, for the comforts of family. But Constable’s Vivaldi is manipulative, tempestuous and petty, hardly an adequate father figure. Still, Anna Maria, terrified of being married off or sent into a life of menial labor like the girls who don’t make it in the orchestra, devotes herself to him and to music, believing that to be her ticket to freedom.
Reading about music for 300-odd pages without hearing a single note might sound unrewarding. But Constable brings the sensory experience of Anna Maria’s sound to life through visuals: Anna Maria sees music as colors, characters and stories. During her first concert, “the notes come, splashing and luminous. A bolt of orange here, a dash of magenta there.” These techniques give the music in the novel enough shape, texture and heft that it very nearly becomes an ancillary character.
It’s evident immediately that Anna Maria is incredibly skilled, but in a patriarchal society, she and Vivaldi can’t be equals. Though Vivaldi needs Anna Maria — he convinces her to improve his compositions — he doesn’t respect her as an artist in her own right. “You are, after all, a girl, a woman. What did you think? That you were going to take a place in history as one of the greatest composers of all time?” he says derisively. His voice is a stand-in for a society that considers women second-class citizens.
Read More: She Was a Pioneering but Forgotten Musician. Now She’s a Literary Hero.
