The Four Seasons: A Novel of Vivaldi's Venice

by Laurel Corona

  As she boarded the gondola, Chiaretta was not sure whether it was the rocking of the boat or the unexpected acclaim that made her so dizzy she had to reach out for the gondolier to hold herself up. As they pulled away from the dock, Chiaretta looked back at the quay. A couple waved, though they could not have seen her inside the felce, and though the sound was faint, she was sure she heard them call her name.

  When they arrived, the figlie dico rowere ushered up the grand staircase of the Morosini home to the piano nobile. The marble floor of the portego, the reception room that ran uninterrupted the entire length of the house, reflected sunshine from both ends of the hallway, from the loggia overlooking the Grand Canal to the windows that opened onto a courtyard on the other end. Huge gilded mirrors on the walls passed the light back and forth, so the whole room was bathed in a pearlescent glow. Banquet tables were set up at one end, and chairs upholstered in gold damask were scattered against the walls.

  Tiny jewels strung on gold threads sparkled in Antonia’s hair as she stood with her mother near the middle of the room. Her dress had a bodice of embroidered damask and a lavender silk skirt that rustled and shone as she ran toward the girls.

  She pulled Chiaretta aside. Her breath smelled of ginger candy as she whispered in her friend’s ear. “There’s a man whose family is talking to mine about marriage.”

  “Marriage to you? You’re thirteen!”

  “Shh!” Antonia looked around to see if anyone had overheard.

  “Not now—in a few years. My parents think arranging something now will be best.”

  She motioned over her shoulder. “Look in the corner—he’s wearing a red waistcoat.”

  Chiaretta saw no young men and continued to scan the crowd. “Don’t be so obvious,” Antonia said. “He’s the one with the black pouch with gold trim, talking to my brother Claudio.”

  “He’s so old!” Chiaretta blurted out. “Do you want to marry him?”

  Antonia’s expression was blank. “I suppose so. It’s a good match, my parents think. It could be worse. He is rather handsome, don’t you think?”

  Chiaretta had to admit that the idea of marriage was exciting, since married women lived in houses like this one, and gave parties where they wore jewels. She looked at the man again, trying to picture Antonia as his wife. “I guess so,” she said.

  Bernardo Morosini broke away from his guests and came to greet them. “Chiaretta, cara, so good to see you again. Welcome to my home. Are you in fine voice tonight?”

  “Yes, sir,” she replied, “and we’ve been practicing a special treat for you.”

  “Ah, such a shame I’ll have to wait until we’ve eaten. But you’ve made the prospect so delightful I won’t wait another minute!” Raising his voice, he called his guests to attention. “Please, ladies and gentlemen, these beautiful young women have told me they won’t perform until I have fed them.”

  The guests laughed and began to walk over to the table, chatting among themselves. Chiaretta hung back, uncertain what to do, but Antonia took her hand. “You’re sitting next to me. My mother said so.”

  Antonia led her to a place at a large table that gleamed from years of vigorous polishing. Candles had been lit down the middle, catching the glow of three silver serving bowls spaced along its length, in which an assortment of fruit was heaped.

  “We’re having oysters first, then soup,” Antonia said. Chiaretta’s heart fell. I don’t know what an oyster is, she thought darkly, but I get soup every day. If that’s all there is to eat, they’ve been lying to me.

  Servants had appeared with decanters of wine they poured into Murano glass goblets. Chiaretta noticed that even the figlie’s glasses were being filled, and she nudged Antonia. “We get wine?”

  “Half a glass,” her friend said, wrinkling her nose. “I don’t like it anyway. They’ll pour a little water in it if you ask.”

  More servants came in carrying trays on which shells were arranged. “For the signorine?” one of them said, smiling, as he deposited two oysters on each of their plates. The blob in the shell was the color of the half-digested food that large shorebirds left in splats on the Riva, and just as slimy looking. “We eat that?” Chiaretta asked Antonia.

  “It’s an oyster! It’s delicious.” Antonia lifted it to her mouth. “Tastes fresh, just like the ocean.”

  If the ocean was anything like the canals, it certainly wasn’t fresh. Chiaretta poked at the gray blob, watching it quiver, while Antonia polished off her second one.

  “Don’t chew, just swallow,” the voice on the other side of her said. She put the oyster in her mouth and held it for a moment, then shut her eyes and swallowed it down. She gagged. It felt like the mucus sliding down her throat when she warmed up to sing. Her eyes watered, and a burst of saliva stung her jaw.

  “Here,” the voice was saying, and she felt a napkin brush against her mouth. She looked up at Antonia’s brother Claudio. “I suppose it is a bit of a shock that people eat something that ugly,” he said.

  “And it tastes ugly too,” Chiaretta said. “I’m sorry. I guess that wasn’t very polite.”

  “But honest,” he said, looking at her as if he wanted to say something more. But the woman on his other side was speaking to him. He excused himself and turned to her.

  The soup was being served, and though it was delicious, with tiny bits of meat and vegetables, Chiaretta’s mood grew even more glum. A bowl of broth and the disgusting lump in her stomach were not what she had been expecting.

  And then the bowls were cleared, and the servants were bringing out one platter after another—pheasant, calves’ liver, veal—coming back again and again to ask if she wanted more of this or that, putting colorful mounds of vegetables on her plate, pouring one sauce over one dish and another over something else.

  She ate until the food stopped coming, finishing one last bite as Bernardo Morosini rose to his feet. “We have a sweet for you,” he said, “but I propose that we save that for later and adjourn now to the other end of the portego. I, for one, have waited far too long to hear our guests perform. If that is acceptable to you?” He gave a perfunctory look around the table, but the guests were already pushing out their chairs.

  Claudio was among the first to get up. “Signorina,” he said, pulling out Chiaretta’s chair. She wanted to feel dainty as she rose and thanked him, but her stomach felt as big as her head. She felt a burp making its way up her chest, but fortunately Claudio had already gone to assist someone else, and it escaped unheard into her hands.

  The figlie were gathering, and she and Antonia went to join them. Singing with such a full stomach was not as pleasant as Chiaretta had thought it might be. She felt a little sleepy and was afraid to take in too deep a breath for fear it might explode out of her in a belch. But the music sounded so rich and different echoing off the marble floors than it did from the balcony of the chapel, and the looks on the guests’ faces were so approving that within minutes she felt her voice radiating from her, like the heat from a coal.

  The time for the surprise had arrived. Antonia had told the maestra what her father’s favorite songs were, and the maestra had chosen one that was not too bawdy for the figlie to sing.

  After a short introduction on the lute, Chiaretta began her solo.

  I saw a dove come from the sky,

  And swoop down into my garden

  Over its breast two wings were folded

  And in its mouth a blossom...

  Antonia and the rest of the figlie joined in, their voices filling the portego.

  Would you like to smell the scent of love?

  Its fragrance so grand from a flower so small.

  Antonia’s father dabbed at his eyes when the girls finished. Chiaretta looked around, dazed by the sound of applause. She tried to to see if Claudio was clapping, but she couldn’t find him, and her glance fell instead upon Antonia’s intended. In his eyes she saw a different look, a hooded expression she did not understand. Without knowing why, she became aware
of the handkerchiefs pressing against her ribs. She averted her eyes and didn’t look up again until the applause had stopped.

  Night was falling when the figlie di coro descended the stairs and boarded the gondola for home. Several of the guests accompanied them back, among them Claudio and Antonia’s intended. The men sat in the open air while the girls clustered inside the felce, shivering from the damp.

  Chiaretta was too tired to talk, so she leaned her head on another girl’s shoulder and listened to the chatter. Shutting her eyes, she returned to thoughts of being the queen of a house like that, of having a husband who was a younger version of Antonia’s father, so kind and generous. She would have pearls in her hair and blossoms tucked in her bosom...

  She must have drifted off to sleep, because the next thing she noticed was the bump of the gondola against the dock. When she left the felce, she saw that the men who had escorted them had donned black capes and hats, and their faces were covered with white masks. Claudio was on the dock, still holding his mask in his hand as he directed the gondoliers to return without them.

  As Chiaretta stepped over the railing to get off the gondola, one of the masked men took her hand. When he lifted her up, she felt his hand slip under her petticoat and brush the back of her knee, his fingers traveling up the inside of her thigh almost to the top. Startled, she wriggled away from his hand and did not turn around until she was on the dock. She looked back at him and saw the red doublet peeking out from under his cape and the gold trim of a black pouch reflecting in the torchlight.

  EIGHT

  Chiaretta told no one, not even maddalena, what the man had done. The next few times Antonia came for a lesson she avoided her, feeling somehow to blame for what had happened. As the months passed, the incident faded from her mind. And then, the subject of his marriage to Antonia was abruptly closed. Her father had been angry and her mother upset, but Antonia was told only that the details were not suitable for a young girl to hear.

  Chiaretta breathed a sigh of relief when she learned Antonia was not to marry him. The mocking, frozen grin on the white mask came into her mind from time to time, unbidden, as if to say that with such cover no one would ever be guilty of anything, and that silence would be the price of maintaining her own modesty.

  Soon Chiaretta was caught up in the preparations for an oratorio the figlie had been told might be Francesco Gasparini’s last for the Pietà.

  “Is he dying?” Chiaretta asked the girl standing next to her. She had laid eyes on the Maestro di Coro only two or three times because his fame was such that he usually appeared only to rehearse and conduct premieres of his new works. Still, something about the way everyone’s voice changed when his name came up made him seem almost as important as the doge.

  “No, they say he’s retiring,” the girl replied.

  “Again,” snickered an older figlia beside her.

  Chiaretta had not been in on the joke, but Anna Maria was. “No one is very happy with him anymore,” she told Maddalena and Chiaretta later. “They say he’s supposed to be here more often, and the music he sends is a lot of rearrangements, nothing original.”

  “How do you know so much?” Maddalena asked.

  “I just stand near the maestre, and I hear things.”

  Chiaretta thought for a moment. “I heard one of the maestre say something like ‘not this again,’ when she was looking at some music, but I assumed I had heard wrong.”

  “Which one?”

  “Fioruccia.”

  “Well of course,” Anna Maria said. “She hates Gasparini. Well, maybe not hates. She’s always praying every time I see her outside the sala, so I guess she’s not supposed to hate anybody. But I heard her talking to one of the other maestre about how he was taking whores’ music—”

  “What?” Chiaretta and Maddalena gasped in unison.

  “He puts Latin words to melodies he writes for opera singers, and then we sing them. She said people in the audience recognize the music and imagine love scenes while we’re singing about God. Like that duet of the Gloria last week—”

  “I loved that!” said Chiaretta. “I wish it had been my solo.”

  “Of course you do.” Anna Maria reached up and pulled Chiaretta’s cap down over her eyes. “Little ‘greedy for attention’! But I guess that was her point. Fancy enough to make us prideful. You know—the kind of music the Virgin doesn’t want to hear.”

  How could the Virgin not want to hear her sing her best? Chiaretta wondered. Still, she supposed that with the amount Fioruccia prayed she might know more about what made the people in heaven unhappy. Chiaretta started praying with a little more fervor before a statue of the Virgin in an alcove off one of the walkways. Watching Mary’s face for a sign of disapproval, after a few weeks she concluded that her stone eyes had softened. Chiaretta interpreted this to mean that the Virgin might allow a little room for her high notes and trills as long as she didn’t forget to pray afterward. Still, after each of her performances she cast a furtive look around to make sure she didn’t have to pass too close to Fioruccia.

  Maddalena gave Fioruccia no further thought, especially when the Congregazione hired Vivaldi as a composer to make up the shortfall in Gasparini’s music. Maddalena worried about his haggard appearance and his constant wheeze during her lessons, but he reassured her he had never felt better in his life.

  “Perhaps you will be the next Gasparini,” she said one afternoon.

  Vivaldi shook his head. “It will never happen. There has never been a Maestro di Coro at any of the ospedali who doesn’t play the organ. And besides, I’m not sure I would want the job.”

  “Why not?”

  “For the same reason Gasparini seems to be losing interest. It’s difficult to spend so much energy on students who have no future.”

  “No future? What do you mean? The Pietà will always be here.”

  “But not you, not your sister, not Anna Maria.” He sighed.

  “Maddalena, think about it. A girl learns to sing or play so beautifully that the whole city is at her feet. She performs for a few years, and then she gives way so those she has taught can have their turn. Or she enters a convent, where the church officials go back and forth on the issue of whether music is corrupting or ennobling for women to hear. So some years she plays music and others she doesn’t, or more likely she skulks around doing it on the sly and feeling like a sinner.”

  Maddalena thought for a moment. “Chiaretta wants to be an opera singer. What about that?”

  Vivaldi laughed. “She can forget it.”

  “Why? Isn’t she good enough?”

  His eyes grew distant, as if he were remembering Chiaretta’s voice. “No,” he said. “That’s not it. Your sister was born to sing opera.” He stood up and walked to the window, thinking for a minute before turning back to her. “You know, there’s money in opera, and I’m a priest without a parish. I can’t live on the money I make giving violin lessons. This place”— he swept his arm in all directions to indicate the Pietà—“loves its music and starves its composers.”

  He sat down again and rubbed his brow, squeezing his eyes shut.

  “Are you... in pain? Do you need me to do something?”

  “No. I was just thinking about the opera singers I work with. I would give anything to have someone like Chiaretta. It’s not just her voice or how pretty she is. She has such a sense of drama, such a spirit...”

  Maddalena was confused. “Well then... ?”

  “The Pietà would never allow it.” He sliced his hand through the air in front of him as if he were chopping it in half. “Never. The putte are angels. Virgin angels. Without that, they’re just musicians. The balcony says, ‘Here stand women who have the special protection of God.’ So do you think the Congregazione would ever allow the perception that the figlie are in training to become painted women who lounge in gondolas and gamble at the Ridotto?”

  Maddalena looked at her folded hands in her lap and said nothing.

  “For m
ost men, what you can’t be is far more exciting than what you can.” His voice was almost a whisper.

  Maddalena’s heart was too heavy to try to think about what he meant. “She can marry,” she threw out in a tone that admitted defeat.

  “Yes, that’s true. But did you know that husbands must sign an oath that any bride coming from one of the ospedali will never sing or play an instrument outside her home? And that he also has to post a very large bond, which he forfeits if she does? So some lucky child is sung to sleep by the best voice in Venice, and some husband is entertained by a lute or a harpsichord in his parlor, but that’s all that comes from years of training.”

  Maddalena sat quietly, absorbing the message.

  Vivaldi interrupted her grim thoughts. “Surely you don’t think the musical education you receive is strictly for the glory of God.”

  “No,” she said, surprised by the quiver in her voice. “They tell us that, but we know it’s also to make us more marriageable.”

  “And it does. But most of you do not marry, is that not right?”

  Over her years in the Pietà, Maddalena had seen more figlie end up in convents than anywhere else.

  “Well, isn’t it?” he demanded. She nodded her head.

  “Cara, perhaps I am being too cynical, and perhaps I should say nothing more, but I think you don’t understand what the Pietà is all about.”

  Cara? Maddalena tried to focus on what he was saying, but her heart was racing at having been called “dear.”

  “What are there now—eight hundred, a thousand girls at the Pietà, not even counting the patients in the hospital? Can you imagine how much it costs to put even a tiny fire in what—a hundred rooms perhaps? Bread and a little soup in every stomach? The Congregazione is not out for profit overall, but that doesn’t mean they don’t try to make money wherever they can. They’re not fools. You appear behind a grille to drive the audience to distraction. You’re not nuns, so you can be bought by marriage, or at least borrowed to entertain at their parties. There’s no more delicious fantasy in Venice than having one of you for their own, and those who can afford it pay dearly for the privilege of your company for even an hour. Without you, the Pietà would be insolvent. No question about it.”