FictionalCities :: Vivaldi

As I type this in May 2008 I'm reading my third novel in a little over six months conjecting on the life of Antonio Vivaldi. I've also listened to a BBC radio play and watched a DVD of a more substantial play put on in San Francisco. In addition there are two films of the composer's life currently in production.

So I thought that this surge of interest and ideas deserved a special page to bring together the strands of these conjectures and relate them to reality. Vivaldi's life is so open to imaginative theories because not much is known about his life beyond the details of what he composed and who he composed for. Doubts have even been cast as to whether some of the accepted portraits of him, including the one I've posted here, are actually of him.

Biography
Vivaldi was born in Venice and baptised at the church of San Giovanni Battista in Bragora (see below right). He was later ordained as a priest but an illness (probably asthma) provided an excuse for him to be excused celebrating mass, leaving him free to devote his time to music. He taught at, and composed for, the Ospedale della Pieta, where the orphaned females who trained as musicians performed his music and lived lives much researched recently. Later, having been sacked by the Pieta to save money, he moved to Mantua to take up the post of Maestro di Cappella at the court of Prince Phillip and stayed for seven years. Whilst living here he became attached to Paolina Trevisana and her younger half-sister, Anna Giro. They travelled back with him when he left Mantua to return to Venice. The Pieta hired him again, and he also became an opera impresario. Paolina became his personal assistant, and Anna Giro developed into his protégée. Later in his life he moved to Vienna, for reasons uncertain. It was planned that he become court composer to Charles VI, but the sudden death of the king soon after his arrival left him high and dry. He died soon after.
(For fuller biographical details there's a site where you can download pdf files of a couple of good biographies for free.
It's here.)

The elements of this sparse personal biography most fruitful for novelists are, unsurprisingly, the bits that involve the famous composer and priest with girls and women. This tack also allows the inclusion of juicy titbits and life-stories from that recent research into the lives of the Pieta girls.

Novels/Plays
The links are to the full reviews on my Venice page.

First off the blocks last October, was Vivaldi’s Virgins by Barbara Quick which firmly foregrounded the lives of the orphans, in particular violinist Anna Maria. It was basically the story of a girl growing up but with much fun had with the spicy 18th century Venetian background. The lure of the sparkling life of palazzo parties and the mystery of the lost mother were other non-musical themes explored.

November 2008 sees the publication of The Four Seasons by Laurel Corona, which again uses Vivaldi as something of a secondary, though charismatic, character whilst exploring the lives of two sisters left at the Pieta. One of the sisters becomes Vivaldi's violin protégée and there's a good deal of smothered passion too. The character is called Maddalena but the strong echoes of the Anna Giro mystery are there. The real Anna and Paolina appear too, with Anna particularly presented as something of a demanding tart. The radio play Daughters of Venice by Don Taylor also deals (in a lighter-hearted way this time) with the facts of life for the girls in the Pieta, with Vivaldi the late-appearing star turn.

In Hidden harmonies: the Secret Life of Antonio Vivaldi André Romijn concentrates on the composer and makes some more wild guesses at the nature of his relationship with Anna Giro, but also deals deeply and revels in the music, as a novel about Vivaldi should, you'd think. The theory put forward here (spoiler alert!) is that Anna is the fruit of a drunken 'encounter' at a party between Vivaldi and Paolina. The memory of the encounter haunts Vivaldi and so when he finds her he rescues her from her violent child-molesting father, she becomes his (chastely loved) lifetime companion and secretary and together they bring up Anna in Vivaldi's family home. Paolina doesn't tell Vivaldi that Anna is his daughter, but he suspects.

In her play The Red Priest of Venice Lisa Jean Murphy deals with the developing relationship between the composer and Paolina in a much less liberty-taking way, but she also doesn't go so far as to expect them to deny their feelings or growing attachment.

Update April 2009: Hidden Voices: The Orphan Musicians of Venice by Pat Lowery Collins, another novel about Vivaldi's Pieta girls, has just been published.

Films
It remains to be seen what theories the films currently planned throw up about the Vivaldi/Paolina/Anna thing. Watch this space.

One of these is set to star Ralph Fiennes as the composer, and also stars Gerard Depardieu and Jacqueline Bisset. It has a website which has a trailer. But said trailer is bizarrely made up of clips from other Venice-set films and scenes featuring the actors in other period films - wearing facial hair and floppy white shirts without buttons, basically - except for Malcolm McDowell, who's in a modern suit. The names of the characters do not match with any of real people in the composer's life, so presumably this is going to be a totally fictional affair.

The other film is rumoured to deal with Vivaldi's relationship with Anna Giro and the 'fact' of her being the muse that inspired The Four Seasons, despite her being a child at the time of the piece's publication and he 47. This one has taken more than four years not getting made and fact that the writers seem to have been actors and stunt men in various unspecial US TV series is another cause for pessimism.

And I've just found out that there was a French film last year that actually got made, called Antonio Vivaldi, un prince à Venise. This one was written and directed by someone who's previous work includes a bio-pic of J.S. Bach. It does feature Anna Giro and judging by the pics on the (now lost) website it looks like a bit of a flouncy lace-fest. It hasn't seen a release outside France except, it seems, in South Korea. There is a trailer on YouTube.

Update April 2009: Both the American films have yet to start filming, it seems, and there's now a UK/Italian TV production which has reached the post-production stage and stars all sorts of Brit actors with little or no previous, including Mick Jagger's son James as a pupil of Vivaldi and someone called Steven Cree as the man himself. A male pupil of Vivaldi is something new, to be sure, and all the other names of characters seem invented, so I'd anticipate the old poetic licence getting something of a thrashing here.

Update April 2010: The date of the start of filming continues to change on the site for the Fiennes-featuring film, but that's about the only action. The TV film with Steven Cree seems to have been made, as two 90-minute episodes, and to be showing at the International Catholic Film Festival in Rome in June. It seems to stress Vivaldi's reputation as a red-headed babe-magnet and to start with the shipwreck of his lover and their daughter on a boat from England. There is a trailer here. It looks truly awful and loaded with cliché.

The current Pieta church is on a site next to that of the original complex.

One of the houses Vivaldi lived in, now the Hotel Rio.