Range - David Epstein Page 0,22
striking defect.”
A poem had recently been written about one of the best singers: “Missing are the fingers of her left hand / Also absent is her left foot.” An accomplished instrumentalist was the “poor limping lady.” Other guests left even less considerate records.
Like Rousseau, English visitor Lady Anna Miller was entranced by the music and pleaded to see the women perform with no barrier hiding them. “My request was granted,” Miller wrote, “but when I entered I was seized with so violent a fit of laughter, that I am surprised they had not driven me out again. . . . My eyes were struck with the sight of a dozen or fourteen beldams ugly and old . . . these with several young girls.” Miller changed her mind about watching them play, “so much had the sight of the performers disgusted me.”
The girls and women who delighted delicate ears had not lived delicate lives. Many of their mothers worked in Venice’s vibrant sex industry and contracted syphilis before they had babies and dropped them off at the Ospedale della Pietà. The name literally means “Hospital of Pity,” but figuratively it was the House of Mercy, where the girls grew up and learned music. It was the largest of four ospedali, charitable institutions in Venice founded to ameliorate particular social ills. In the Pietà’s case, the ill was that fatherless babies (mostly girls) frequently ended up in the canals.
Most of them would never know their mothers. They were dropped off in the scaffetta, a drawer built into the outer wall of the Pietà. Like the size tester for carry-on luggage at the airport, if a baby was small enough to fit, the Pietà would raise her.
The great Anna Maria was a representative example. Someone, probably her mother, who was probably a prostitute, took baby Anna Maria to the doorstep of the Pietà on the waterfront of Venice’s St. Mark’s Basin, along a bustling promenade. A bell attached to the scaffetta alerted staff of each new arrival. Babies were frequently delivered with a piece of fabric, a coin, ring, or some trinket left in the scaffetta as a form of identification should anyone ever return to claim them. One mother left half of a brilliantly illustrated weather chart, hoping one day to return with the other half. As with many of the objects, and many of the girls, it remained forever in the Pietà. Like Anna Maria, most of the foundlings would never know a blood relative, and so they were named for their home: Anna Maria della Pietà—Anna Maria of the Pieta. An eighteenth-century roster lists Anna Maria’s de facto sisters: Adelaide della Pietà, Agata della Pietà, Ambrosina della Pietà, and on and on, all the way through Violeta, Virginia, and Vittoria della Pietà.
The ospedali were public-private partnerships, each overseen by a volunteer board of upper-class Venetians. The institutions were officially secular, but they were adjoined to churches, and life inside ran according to quasi-monastic rules. Residents were separated according to age and gender. Daily Mass was required before breakfast, and regular confession was expected. Everyone, even children, worked constantly to keep the institution running. One day a year, girls were allowed a trip to the countryside, chaperoned, of course. It was a rigid existence, but there were benefits.
The children were taught to read, write, and do arithmetic, as well as vocational skills. Some became pharmacists for the residents, others laundered silk or sewed ship sails that could be sold. The ospedali were fully functioning, self-contained communities. Everyone was compensated for their work, and the Pietà had its own interest-paying bank meant to help wards learn to manage their own money. Boys learned a trade or joined the navy and left as teenagers. For girls, marriage was the primary route to emancipation. Dowries were kept ready, but many wards stayed forever.
As the ospedali accrued instruments, music was added to the education of dozens of girls so that they could play during religious ceremonies in the adjacent churches. After a plague in 1630 wiped out one-third of the population, Venetians found themselves in an especially “penitential mood,” as one historian put it. The musicians suddenly became more important.
The ospedali governors noticed that a lot more people were attending church, and that the institutional endowments swelled with donations proportional to the quality of the girls’ music. By the eighteenth century, the governors were openly promoting the musicians for fund-raising. Each Saturday and Sunday, concerts began before sunset. The church was so packed that