Range - David Epstein Page 0,21

were the all-female cast known as the figlie del coro, literally, “daughters of the choir.” Leisure activities like horseback riding and field sports were scarce in the floating city, so music bore the full weight of entertainment for its citizens. The sounds of violins, flutes, horns, and voices spilled into the night from every bobbing barge and gondola. And in a time and place seething with music, the figlie dominated for a century.

“Only in Venice,” a prominent visitor wrote, “can one see these musical prodigies.” They were both ground zero of a musical revolution and an oddity. Elsewhere, their instruments were reserved for men. “They sing like angels, play the violin, the flute, the organ, the oboe, the cello, and the bassoon,” an astonished French politician remarked. “In short, no instrument is large enough to frighten them.” Others were less diplomatic. Aristocratic British writer Hester Thrale complained, “The sight of girls handling the double bass, and blowing into the bassoon did not much please me.” After all, “suitable feminine instruments” were more along the lines of the harpsichord or musical glasses.

The figlie left the king of Sweden in awe. Literary rogue Casanova marveled at the standing-room-only crowds. A dour French concert reviewer singled out a particular violinist: “She is the first of her sex to challenge the success of our great artists.” Even listeners not obviously disposed to support the arts were moved. Francesco Coli described “angelic Sirens,” who exceeded “even the most ethereal of birds” and “threw open for listeners the doors of Paradise.” Especially surprising praise, perhaps, considering that Coli was the official book censor for the Venetian Inquisition.

The best figlie became Europe-wide celebrities, like Anna Maria della Pietà. A German baron flatly declared her “the premier violinist in Europe.” The president of the parliament of Burgundy said she was “unsurpassed” even in Paris. An expense report that Vivaldi recorded in 1712 shows that he spent twenty ducats on a violin for sixteen-year-old Anna Maria, an engagement-ring-like sum for Vivaldi, who made that much in four months. Among the hundreds of concertos Vivaldi wrote for the figlie del coro are twenty-eight that survived in the “Anna Maria notebook.” Bound in leather and dyed Venetian scarlet, it bears Anna Maria’s name in gold leaf calligraphy. The concertos, written specifically to showcase her prowess, are filled with high-speed passages that require different notes to be played on multiple strings at the same time. In 1716, Anna Maria and the figlie were ordered by the Senate to intensify their musical work in an effort to bring God’s favor to the Venetian armies as they battled the Ottoman Empire on the island of Corfu. (In that siege, the Venetian violin, and a well-timed storm, proved mightier than the Turkish cannon.)

Anna Maria was middle-aged in the 1740s, when Jean-Jacques Rousseau came to visit. The rebel philosopher who would fuel the French Revolution was also a composer. “I had brought with me from Paris the national prejudice against Italian music,” Rousseau wrote. And yet he declared that the music played by the figlie del coro “has not its like, either in Italy, or the rest of the world.” Rousseau had one problem, though, that “drove me to despair.” He could not see the women. They performed behind a thin crepe hung in front of wrought-iron latticework grilles in elevated church balconies. They could be heard, but only their silhouettes seen, tilting and swaying with the tides of the music, like shadow pictures in a vaudeville stage set. The grilles “concealed from me the angels of beauty,” Rousseau wrote. “I could talk of nothing else.”

He talked about it so much that he happened to talk about it with one of the figlie’s important patrons. “If you are so desirous to see those little girls,” the man told Rousseau, “it will be an easy matter to satisfy your wishes.”

Rousseau was so desirous. He pestered the man incessantly until he took him to meet the musicians. And there, Rousseau, whose fearless writing would be banned and burned before it fertilized the soil of democracy, grew anxious. “When we entered the salon which confined these longed-for beauties,” he wrote, “I felt an amorous trembling, which I had never before experienced.”

The patron introduced the women, the siren prodigies whose fame had spread like a grassfire through Europe—and Rousseau was stunned.

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There was Sophia—“horrid,” Rousseau wrote. Cattina—“she had but one eye.” Bettina—“the smallpox had entirely disfigured her.” “Scarcely one of them,” according to Rousseau, “was without some