Harriet Constable
One of The Observer's best new novelists for 2024 on telling the story of a female violin virtuoso in Vivaldi's Venice, plus her top three books about music
Harriet Constable. Image courtesy of Bloomsbury Publishing
When I read about Harriet Constable’s new novel, The Instrumentalist, I immediately knew it was going straight on to my TBR list. The book heads to Vivaldi’s Venice and the Ospedale della Pietà , where one of the orphan girls, Anna Maria, became one of the composer’s star musicians. When she played, so it was said, ‘countless angels dare to hover near’.
The story of a female musician succeeding in a man’s world, The Instrumentalist is one of The Observer’s debuts of 2024 to watch out for, and since it came out earlier this month it has had glowing reviews. Harriet is a writer and film-maker based in London, and she joined me on Zoom to talk about the art of writing about music in fiction.
Why did you decide to tell Anna Maria’s story in the form of a novel?
I’ve always loved historical fiction because of its way of combining truth and fiction and bringing a world alive. Anna Maria, my main character, was probably the greatest violinist of the 18th century. She was said to eclipse even the great Giuseppe Tartini, and she was Vivaldi’s favourite student. I was able to discover some really wonderful facts about her.
What I couldn’t find out was how it felt to be Anna Maria. How did it feel to be one of these girls and women who were destined to drown in the Venetian canals and instead were posted through this wall to the orphanage where they’re given something completely ahead of their time: a musical education.
Fiction is a way to take us there and imagine what that might have been like. In doing so I want to do justice to their extraordinary talent and their beautiful creative minds and all of the fear they must have felt by living on this knife edge between either making it as a great musician or falling back into the abyss from which they came.
Did you feel a certain responsibility to Anna Maria in telling her story?
It’s very difficult to transition from journalism to fiction. It takes a lot of work to give yourself permission to start inventing. I felt these women and girls were so remarkable and their story had to be done justice to. I hope I have done that. Equally I hope more voices will follow and explore these stories because there are hundred and hundreds of them.
I did an enormous amount of research. I created a horizontal timeline to piece together what might be a fair representation of Anna Maria’s mindset. I started to tot up the big moments in her life compared to Vivaldi’s, seeing how to piece together a worldview from that.
She lived in the most extraordinary, advanced place on earth. She was probably quite confident from that, but she was an orphan and didn’t have healthy adult role models and may have a feeling of being abandoned. That would certainly shave off some of that confidence. She had to save herself with music.
How did you approach writing about music?
There are three different avenues I took. The first was learning as much about music as I possibly could. I hired a violinist to give me lessons, though I discovered that was going to take far too long. What really happened is I ended up paying someone to come and play the violin for me while I sat there and got her to stop at different moments. I’d ask, how did you get to that note? Where was that difficult? What does that feel like when you nailed that? Niche questions.
I also sat in on some lessons at the Royal Academy of Music. I interviewed prodigies, maestros and composers to understand what it feels like for them. These musicians are so talented and experience music in a way that most of us never will.
We don’t know if Anna Maria had synaesthesia [a type of sensory crossover where people experience music as colours], but I thought, I’m supposed I’m allowed to do that. Make the music tangible and give it colour and have Anna Maria physically see it. We don’t know she didn’t have it. For me it felt like a really exciting way to visualise how remarkable her mind must have been.
Do you listen to music while you’re writing?
Certain scenes of the book were written in time with the music. For example there’s a scene at the beginning where Anna Maria first hears Vivaldi playing and she’s never heard music like it. She thinks he might be possessed and it’s twisting and turning in a way that’s sort of frightening but completely captivating. I wrote that to the third movement of ‘Summer’ from The Four Seasons, and I can read the scene in time to that. I tried to make it work with the musical feelings of energy and terror.
I had the piece Experience by Einaudi on my playlist and once I had completed the book I started to feel it encapsulated the whole plot. It begins quietly and gently, then rises to this mania, gripping desperately, and is hopeful in a sad kind of way. And then there are these moments of crushing silence. I thought I could try putting the plot over the top of it, and I used it to narrate a teaser for the book, which we sent out a week before the auction to tell publishers the book was coming. I don’t think people usually do that but it seemed right to me for this setting.
Let’s turn to the pieces of music writing you’d like to recommend…
Gone: A Girl, A Violin, A Life Unstrung by Min Kym
Viking (2017)
This book is astonishing. I don't think many writers are able to explain the extraordinary relationship between a prodigy and their instrument in the way Min Kym does. She writes about meeting her violin for the first time, how her Stradivarius had been waiting for her and she had been waiting for it, as if it’s a person in its own right.
It’s the story of losing her million pound instrument and in doing so feeling she is no longer whole. The question becomes whether she’s able to piece herself back together and is she able to find the violin. It’s heart-wrenching and beautiful. It’s also the story of having this extraordinary skill and talent and being controlled and manipulated for it. It’s pretty difficult to be a prodigy, I think.
Harper (2001)
Bel Canto is set in this unnamed host country, amid a hostage situation. It’s the story of what happens between captors and captives when music is what threads them together. The lead character is an opera singer, Roxane Coss.
The way in which Ann Patchett is able to write about music is like a melody itself. How she’s able to express the extraordinary power that music has, even in this most terrifying of situations. The terror, she calls it ‘nothing, nothing like song’, but then Roxane’s voice is so vivid and warm, and everyone – hostage or terrorist – can’t help but be drawn to it. The book won Patchett many accolades, quite rightly.
Another Year of Wonder: Classical Music for Every Day by Clemency Burton-Hill
Headline Home (2021)
Well, there is of course A Year of Wonder. I have Another Year of Wonder. I bought it for one of my best friends and we spent all year doing it every single day. I just happened to notice it on the shelf in Primrose Hill Books, and I thought, oh, that’s such a wonderful idea.
It's a classical piece of music for every day of the year. Clemency Burton-Hill has such a lovely way of bringing everyone into the world of classical music and making it feel incredibly welcoming. There is a piece for everyone. I discovered so many new artists in this book.
Things like Anna Meredith’s Solstice (Light Out), which is a riff on The Four Seasons. It’s so extraordinary and strange and exciting. You have to remember when audiences first listened to Vivaldi's music, that’s how it felt for them. So I had never heard that music but Meredith is a remarkable musician who has just done the score for The End We Start From with Jodie Comer. I had no idea about her before I read Clemency Burton-Hill’s book. To see a modern female composer riffing on Vivaldi’s original pieces was so special for me.
The book is also an absolute treasure trove for story ideas and novel ideas.
Are you working on anything at the moment?
Yes, in fact, I’ve just printed out the first seven chapters. I have the first draft, but I’m just trying to get the first seven chapters down for my agent right now. It’s another story of a remarkable woman from history set in the glittering splendour of the early days of the Paris opera. It’s an adventure story, a cat-and-mouse chase.
I’m already looking forward to it. Thank you for sharing your writing wisdom and best of luck with the book launch.
The Instrumentalist is out now.
You can buy all the books mentioned at Bookshop.org, which supports local bookshops and writers. These are affiliate links which means I get a small amount of money if you buy a book via one of the links. Thank you if you do that. Every little helps to keep this Substack going!
The Instrumentalist by Harriet Constable
Gone: A Girl, A Violin, A Life Unstrung by Min Kym
Another Year of Wonder: Classical Music for Every Day by Clemency Burton-Hill
I'll be very interested to see how this compares to Jessica Duchen's historical fiction about music, since she also switches backwards and forwards between journalism and novels ... very successfully, IMO. Harriet's description of her immersion in violin-playing and how hard it is to absorb the essence of a skill that performers have developed since childhood reminds me of the process my friend Helena Attlee went through researching her book Lev's Violin, as a non-musician who was captivated by a particular instruiment and player and wanted to tell their story. And thanks for the reminder about Gone, which I coud easily reread now that I've forgotten the details. I remember being very impressed by it.