The Instrumentalist

"The Instrumentalist is a novel about an all-girls orphanage in Venice, where they’re brought up on music. They learn to play the violin and sing, and Vivaldi teaches them. This is a true story! The novel focuses on one of the orphans, Anna Maria della Pietà, and her relationship with Vivaldi. She becomes not just a star student and a really great violinist, but she starts composing, and Harriet indicates that she may influence Vivaldi as much as he influences her. I was so impressed with how deeply Harriet got into not just the history of this relationship and the orphanage, but also Venice itself. She just describes it beautifully. In fact, there were a couple of passages where I smiled and thought ‘I could have written that (though maybe not as beautifully as her).’ There were just these little details we both picked out. I also thought that she handled describing music really well. It’s very hard to describe music in words. She very cleverly has her heroine have synesthesia , which is a crossing of senses. So when she hears music, she sees color, and Harriet describes all the color. That makes it much easier to imagine the music as a reader. I thought that was really clever. We don’t know. She definitely composed and was written about. People talked about her being a composer, and that her compositions were really good, and had a touch of Vivaldi in them. I suppose Harriet was transposing that—couldn’t it be the other way around? It’s speculative, that part. There are no recordings, obviously, and whatever she composed is lost now. So we don’t know what it sounded like. It reminded me of what I do sometimes, which is to take a real story and see where the gaps are and try to fill them as commonsensically as possible. Yes, it’s about a family of glassmakers on Murano, which is the glass island off of Venice. All the glassmakers were moved there in 1291 because they wanted to prevent fires breaking out in Venice itself from the furnaces. It’s where they still make glass today. Glass was a really important trade for Venice. A lot of money was made off of it, through the Venetian merchants. But it was mainly men who made it and very, very few women. I wanted to write about glass beads, because they were one of the few things that women did make. The thing I loved is that they made them at their kitchen tables, over a little lamp. I just imagined a woman doing that, and she became Orsola, my heroine. Over the course of centuries, she learns to become a really good beadmaker, a maestra . The book is really about how glass affects Venice, and Venice affects glass over the centuries. Also, how it takes 500 years for Orsola’s family to accept her being a glassmaker. Women were dismissed for the longest time. So that’s the flow of the book. I think there is a bit of me in there, always, in these processes. Definitely. Good. I think it might be a little surprising for readers. It certainly was surprising for my editors. When they first read the draft I sent them, they were wondering what I’d done. They said, ‘The story’s great, the characters are great. You’ve done all your research. But shouldn’t they all be dead?’ I guess I was curious about Venice, this wealthy center of trade in the 15th century, becoming what it is now. I think most people don’t really know why and how that happened, me included, so I wanted to cover that whole sweep. Also, the fact that it takes that long for women to finally be accepted in glassmaking. But I didn’t want the family to die off. I didn’t want us to have to follow the descendants of the heroine. I was struggling with how to reconcile those two things and then, one night, I just thought, ‘Oh, well, I just won’t have them die.’ I don’t know, somehow it just seemed to make sense. So yes, Orsola is a girl when she starts out in 1486 and she’s a woman in her late 60s in 2022. It covers the full sweep of it. Admittedly retrospectively, my justification was, ‘Venice is a timeless place and so maybe time runs differently there.’ I think I was affected so much by Venice that I didn’t even realize that I had taken on the timelessness until other people pointed it out."