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 what exactly they were. A young Pietà musician named Prudenza apparently sang beautifully, and performed fluently with the violin and the “violoncello all’inglese.” Music scholars have argued about what that even is, but, as with anything else the Pietà could get its musical mitts on—like the chalumeau (wind) and the psaltery (string)—the figlie learned to play it.
They lifted composers to unexplored heights. They were part of the bridge that carried music from Baroque composers to the classical masters: Bach (who transcribed Vivaldi’s concertos); Haydn (who composed specifically for one of the figlie, Bianchetta, a singer, harpist, and organist); and perhaps Mozart, who visited an ospedale with his father as a boy, and returned as a teen. The figlie’s skills on a vast array of instruments enabled musical experimentation so profound that it laid a foundation for the modern orchestra. According to musicologist Denis Arnold, the modernization of church music that occurred through the figlie was so influential that one of Mozart’s iconic sacred pieces, without the girls of the Venetian orphanages, “might never have been composed at all.”
But their stories were largely forgotten, or thrown away, literally. When Napoleon’s troops arrived in 1797, they tossed manuscripts and records out the ospedali windows. When, two hundred years later, a famous eighteenth-century painting of women giving a concert was displayed at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the mysterious figures dressed in black, in an upper balcony above the audience, went entirely unidentified.
Maybe the memories of the figlie faded because they were women—playing music in public religious ceremonies defied papal authority. Or because so many of them neither came with families nor left any behind. They lacked family names, but the abandoned girls were so synonymous with their instruments that those became their names. The baby who came through a notch in the wall and began her way in the world as Anna Maria della Pietà left the world having been, by various stages, Anna Maria del violino, Anna Maria del theorbo, Anna Maria del cembalo, Anna Maria del violoncello, Anna Maria del luta, Anna Maria della viola d’amore, and Anna Maria del mandolin.
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Imagine it today: click a tourism site and the entertainment recommendation is the world-famous orchestra comprised of orphans left at the doorstep of the music venue. You will be treated to virtuoso solos on instruments you know and love, as well as those you’ve never heard of. Occasionally the musicians will switch instruments during the show. And please follow us on Twitter, @FamousFoundlings. Never mind 200-ducat dowries, the figlie would have speaking agents and feature film deals.
Just like Tiger Woods’s television appearance when he was two, it would foment a frenzy of parents and media seeking to excavate the mysterious secret to success. Parents actually did flock in the eighteenth century. Noblemen vied (and paid) to get their daughters a chance to play with those “able indigents,” as one historian put it.
But the strategies of their musical development would be a hard sell. Today, the massively multi-instrument approach seems to go against everything we know about how to get good at a skill like playing music. It certainly goes against the deliberate practice framework, which only counts highly focused attempts at exactly the skill to be performed. Multiple instruments, in that view, should be a waste of time.
In the genre of modern self-help narratives, music training has stood beside golf atop the podium, exemplars of the power of a narrowly focused head start in highly technical training. Whether it is the story of Tiger Woods or the Yale law professor known as the Tiger Mother, the message is the same: choose early, focus narrowly, never waver.