the Eucharist had to be moved. Visitors were still welcome for free, of course, but if a guest wanted to sit, ospedali staff were happy to rent out chairs. Once the indoor space was full, listeners crowded outside windows, or paused their gondolas in the basin outside. Foundlings became an economic engine not just sustaining the social welfare system in Venice, but drawing tourists from abroad. Entertainment and penitence mixed in amusing ways. Audience members were not allowed to applaud in church, so after the final note they coughed and hemmed and scraped their feet and blew their noses in admiration.
The ospedali commissioned composers for original works. Over one six-year period, Vivaldi wrote 140 concertos exclusively for the Pietà musicians. A teaching system evolved, where the older figlie taught the younger, and the younger the beginners. They held multiple jobs—Anna Maria was a teacher and copyist—and yet they produced star after virtuoso star. After Anna Maria, her soloist successor, Chiara della Pietà, was hailed as the greatest violinist in all of Europe.
It all raises the question: Just what magical training mechanism was deployed to transform the orphan foundlings of the Venetian sex industry, who but for the grace of charity would have died in the city’s canals, into the world’s original international rock stars?
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The Pietà’s music program was not unique for its rigor. According to a list of Pietà directives, formal lessons were Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, and figlie were free to practice on their own. Early in the rise of the figlie del coro, work and chores took most of their time, so they were only allowed an hour a day of music study.
The most surprising feature was how many instruments they learned. Shortly after he received his music doctorate from Oxford, eighteenth-century English composer and historian Charles Burney set out to write a definitive history of modern music, which involved several ospedali visits. Burney, who became famous as both a travel writer and the foremost music scholar of the day, was astounded by what he saw in Venice. On one ospedali trip, he was given a two-hour private performance, with no curtain between him and the performers. “It was really curious to see, as well as to hear, every part of this excellent concert, performed by female violins, hautbois [oboes], tenors, bases, harpsichords, french-horns, and even double bases,” Burney wrote. More curious still, “these young persons frequently change instruments.”
Figlie took singing lessons, and learned to play every instrument their institution owned. It helped that they were paid for learning new skills. A musician named Maddalena married and left institutional life, and toured from London to St. Petersburg, performing as a violinist, harpsichordist, cellist, and soprano. She wrote of “acquiring skills not expected of my sex,” and became so famous that her personal life was covered by one of the day’s gossip writers.
For those who stayed a lifetime in the institution, their multi-instrument background had practical importance. Pelegrina della Pietà, who arrived at the scaffetta swaddled in rags, started on the bass, moved to violin, and then to oboe, all while working as a nurse. Vivaldi wrote oboe parts specifically for Pelegrina, but in her sixties her teeth fell out, abruptly ending her oboe career. So she switched back to violin, and continued performing into her seventies.
The Pieta’s musicians loved to show off their versatility. According to a French writer, they were trained “in all styles of music, sacred or profane,” and gave concerts that “lent themselves to the most varied vocal and instrumental combinations.” Audience members commonly remarked on the wide range of instruments the figlie could play, or on their surprise at seeing a virtuosa singer come out during intermission to improvise an instrumental solo.
Beyond instruments the figlie played in concert, they learned instruments that were probably used primarily for teaching or experimentation: a harpsichord-like spinet; a chamber organ; a giant string instrument known as a tromba marina; a wooden, flutelike instrument covered with leather called a zink; and a viola da gamba, a string instrument played upright and with a bow like a cello, but with more strings, a subtly different shape, and frets befitting a guitar. The figlie weren’t merely playing well, they were participants in an extraordinary period for instrument invention and reinvention. According to musicologist Marc Pincherle, in the multiskilled figlie and their menagerie of instruments, “Vivaldi had at his disposal a musical laboratory of unlimited resources.”
Some of the instruments the figlie learned are so obscure that nobody knows