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 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 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.