The Case of the Orphaned Bassoonists (13 page)

A hundred steps beyond the Salute, I’d be in the depths of the Dorsoduro, back into the city’s dense orchestration of stone: dark corners, leaning towers, street mazes to leave you reeling. Venice could feel heavy and concentrated, with only brief snatches of sky and sky reflected in the narrow canals. Out here on the water, however, density was left behind for something far more transparent and insubstantial. The heaviest villas and palaces wavered in the sunlight; their watery reflections were even less solid.

Walls of stone

Under water

Break into clouds
.

I definitely felt a mood of
sabi
coming on. I reached into my satchel for
Bashō in Lima
, but came up with
Lovers and Virgins
instead. I stared at the cover—not at the plunging necklines and nuns’ habits of the illustration, but at the scribbles I’d made when Nicky had called me from Venice. Nicky’s money. Nicky’s money.

I remembered Albert looking with interest at the book, the wet morning I’d run into him in the Piazza San Marco. The bassoon articles meant nothing to him; neither could the conductor’s biography. Then I realized that next to the word
safe
, I’d scrawled
combination in lentils
.

It wouldn’t take a genius to figure out the meaning of that note. All it would take is someone who knew my address in London, who knew that both Nicky and I were here in Venice, and who was perhaps not as honest as he could be.

T
HE CONSERVATORY OF MUSIC
was housed in a sprawling old
palazzo
off Campo San Stefano. Once white, the enormous building was now stained with the soot of pollution and rain. The exterior was studded barbarically with blackened heads, but there was an undeniable, though broken-down grandeur to the place. A vast, ghostly courtyard of colonnades, bounded at one end by mesh netting full of pigeon feathers, added to the derelict effect. A great Venetian family had lived where now a few hundred students studied. From the upper stories came piano chords and snatches of saxophone and trumpet.

I hadn’t expected Nicky to be on time and was a little late myself, yet there she was, in a corner of the square in front of the conservatory, attempting to blend into the base of a statue. She was dressed, unusually for her, in a sober suit of gray with a long skirt. She’d purchased sensible oxfords and had managed to twist her auburn curls up into a knot. This must be her notion of what a researcher might wear. She even had glasses on a chain around her neck and an elegant leather briefcase.

Boyish in jeans and running shoes, Roberta was lounging impatiently at the peeling front door. “Quick,” she said, after shaking hands with Nicky. “The chief librarian is at lunch. My friend Giovanna is going to take us up. Otherwise they never let anyone into the library.”

“Why, are the materials so precious?” I asked.

“No, they are too lazy,” she said.

The interior of the building was as grand as the outside. We went up a massive staircase to the
piano nobile
, its floor inlaid with pink and gray marble. It was empty save for some large Rococo paintings and a few gilt chairs, and a number of doors. In that, it was like the Sandrettis’ home, but on a much grander scale. All the rooms led off from the
piano nobile
, giving a fairy-tale sense of choice: Which door led to the sacks of gold and which to the dungeon? Which to the tiger and which to the woman? We opened one door and found ourselves in the library, which, especially in comparison to the grand empty hall outside, was small and cramped. A young man was paging through librettos and making copies at a photocopier. A woman with green-rimmed round glasses and an inch of strawberry-pink hair was flipping through the
New Grove Dictionary of Women Composers
in front of her on a long wooden table. Her short sleeveless dress was strawberry to match her hair.

“Giovanna,” Roberta said in English for Nicky’s benefit, “is a teacher of the violin here. She knows a great deal about the Baroque era.”

Giovanna looked more like a ladybug than a music professor, but she had a winning smile and serious eyes.

“Shall we?” Giovanna said, and without another word the four of us disappeared into a back room filled with shelves and files.

“Are these Vivaldi manuscripts?” I asked, as Giovanna began to pull out boxes full of scores. She set the boxes on a table, took off the large glasses and replaced them with a smaller pair of reading specs. She did everything very precisely. She had very beautiful long fingers. I noticed that Nicky was uncharacteristically silent.

“It’s unlikely. Almost everything of Vivaldi’s, his original scores, is in a library in Turin,” Giovanna said. “There were many bound volumes found in a monastery in the 1920s. Before that, if you can believe it, Vivaldi had been almost unknown for over two hundred years. People knew his name, but he was considered a very minor musician. But when they found all his manuscripts and began to catalog and play them, they discovered just what a genius he was.”

“And now we hear Vivaldi’s
Four Seasons
all four seasons of the year until we are sick to death of him,” said Roberta. “It is a terrible irony, isn’t it, to go from obscurity to superfluity in just a few decades.”

Giovanna smiled. She had pretty lips, also strawberry colored. “Some of us are not as enchanted by the Baroque as others.”

“If you worked in a classical music shop, you would feel the same about Vivaldi,” said Roberta. “What about Galuppi, what about Marcello, what about Monteverdi, I ask the tourists. What about Barbara Strozzi? For that matter, what about Philip Glass and Arvo Pärt? But no, the tourists are in Venice. They want
The Four Seasons
.”

Giovanna opened up several of the boxes. “These were probably scores of the Pietà musicians. It’s unlikely any would be in Vivaldi’s own hand, despite his having composed them for the Pietà. He would have worked with copyists to break down the orchestration in parts, so you would have five violin scores, for instance. Life before the copy machine.” She riffled through the scores. “There is some arrangement to this, but we’d have to investigate. I’m not a research specialist, unfortunately, and you would have to have several letters of recommendation and so on for the chief librarian to let you spread everything out and really look at it for days on end. I’m sure, with your reputation,” she smiled at Nicky, “we could easily arrange that.”

Still Nicky was silent. She stared around her at the stacks and shelves of boxes. She looked, with a very dissatisfied expression, at her neatly tied, clunky oxfords.

“What exactly are you searching for?” Roberta prodded.

“Roberta told me you want to make a CD-ROM collection of Vivaldi’s bassoon concertos,” said Giovanna.

Nicky seemed to wake up. “Original bassoon music by a woman composer who might have lived and worked at the Pietà, that’s what I’m looking for.”

“I see the idea has expanded,” I said. “With Nicky, ideas often do.”

Nicky opened her new leather briefcase. “I want,” she said impressively, “to put the Pietà on the map again.” She took out a sort of prospectus from a folder of marbled paper. There was her CV, an overview of the CD-ROM project, a list of bassoon concertos to be performed on compact disc, and color reproductions of the interior of the Pietà church. She handed it all to Giovanna.

“Originally,” Nicky said, “I imagined the project to be completely about Vivaldi, with women musicians performing his work. But now the concept is changing. If it’s possible—I know it must be possible—I want to find music composed by one of the orphaned bassoonists. I want to find out about her. I want to weave her story through the CD-ROM project. Perhaps a video documentary. Maybe something for the BBC. A co-production with Italian television.”

“I love the idea,” said Giovanna. “But—it may be difficult to find such music. “Would this bassoon composer have signed her compositions? Probably not. The women of the
cori
were not encouraged to think of themselves as anything other than members of the orchestra or as teachers.” She pulled out a large leather-bound volume with scores bound in, and the name
Anna Maria
stamped in gold on the cover. “Here is an exception. Anna Maria was a
maestra
, probably around 1720, at the Pietà. She was well known for her proficiency on the harpsichord, cello, lute, mandolin and, of course, violin. She was one of Vivaldi’s brightest stars.”

Giovanna opened the leather book. “Here you see the scores for the first violin of many of Vivaldi’s concerti. But they are Vivaldi’s works. As far as is known, Anna Maria composed nothing herself.”

“Or so they would like us to believe,” said Roberta. “It’s very irritating. All those women musicians—some of them
must
have composed something!”

“You know about Maddalena Lombardini Sirmen?” Giovanna asked Nicky.

“Of course.”

“She was in the
cori
of the Mendicanti,” Giovanna explained to me. “Another of the
ospedali
. She was a well-known violinist, and around 1770 she was able to leave her
ospedale
to marry the composer and violinist Lodovico Sirmen. They toured Europe together and lived in London and Dresden and Paris. It is thought that the compositions that appeared under the name of both her and her husband are hers, as they are in a very different style from what he composed himself. Her string quartets are probably the first ever published by a woman. I remember reading that Mozart’s father used to play them. But I’ve never seen them myself.”

Roberta had been turning the pages of Anna Maria’s book of scores. “What we need,” she said thoughtfully, “is a bound book like this for a bassoonist. Even if it was only scores from Vivaldi, we might find her name and learn to recognize her style.”

“That’s much easier said than done,” exclaimed Giovanna, gesturing to the stacks of shelves and boxes. “There could be something in this room like that. There are other rooms like this in the conservatory. And other museums. And more libraries, also filled with shelves and books.” I could see, in Giovanna’s eyes an Escher-like image of library corridors turning into shelves turning into boxes full of corridors.

“There must be another way,” said Roberta.

“Patience is the only way,” said Giovanna. “Patience, obsession, money perhaps. And only occasionally a little bit of luck. Or sheer coincidence.”

Nicky repeated in a slightly discouraged voice, “or sheer coincidence.” I felt the same on seeing all the boxes. Nicola, whatever her virtues, was not a particularly patient woman. I couldn’t seriously imagine her taking time from her busy career to sit in a cramped Venetian library combing through piles of musical scores. After all, it had taken over two centuries to rediscover Vivaldi himself. And decades to catalog and reissue and record his immense productivity.

Giovanna was looking at her watch. “I am sorry,” she said, hustling us politely from the room. “I wish we had more time. Another day perhaps,” she said to Nicky. “Your girlfriend told us you are in a little bit of trouble.”

“Cassandra is not my girlfriend,” said Nicky, rather severely. “Is there a toilet up here? I’ll join you downstairs in a moment.”

“Of course.”

Roberta, Giovanna and I traipsed down the marble staircase. From behind one of the doors came the tootling sounds of woodwinds warming up; from behind another a woman was singing an aria from
Aida
. “I feel as if I’ve seen bound volumes like that of Anna Maria’s before,” Roberta said as we went through the door to the campo outside.

“They could be in the Biblioteca Marciana,” suggested Giovanna. “They could be there. They could be anywhere.”

“Why, Cassandra,” said Andrew McManus. “What are you doing here?” But he was staring at Roberta, obviously struck once again by her great similarity to her brother.

He was standing in the campo, in conversation with a stylish woman who was hanging chummily on his arm. He wore a corduroy jacket and carried a battered briefcase.

“Sightseeing,” I said nervously. Nicky must be right behind us. I didn’t want Andrew to see her.

“Oh. Well, I was just having lunch with the chief librarian here,” said Andrew. “She’s very interested in my research and is going to make the archives completely available to me. I’ll have a student assistant and access to all the material. I’m so thrilled. And, she says she knows of a flat in her brother’s building that is available.”

“Giovanna,” said the chief librarian. “I wonder if you can take Signore McManus up to the archives and give him a brief overview. He’s looking for material on the girls of the Pietà, particularly the bassoonists.”

“Bassoonists?” Giovanna said, looking surprised. “But…”

“There’s a lot of interest now in the subject,” I said to Giovanna, hoping she would interpret my look to understand that there was a rivalry between Nicky and Andrew and she must on no account help Andrew.

“I see,” said Giovanna, and she gave me a wink as she led Andrew through the door. I had a feeling they would not be starting with the same boxes we had.

“Well,” said Roberta. “I suppose I have to go back to work and sell
The Four Seasons
now.” She paused. “I don’t know if you would be interested, but I’m performing with another group tonight. We do klezmer music sometimes by the Ghetto. Perhaps you and Nicky would like to come.”

“I’ll ask her when she comes down.” I was distracted by Nicky’s absence. Was she hiding to avoid Andrew?

“It’s true what Nicky said?” Roberta pressed me. “You’re not her girlfriend?”

“It’s true,” I said. “She owns a house in London, and she lets me have a room in the attic. We’ve had that arrangement for years.”

“But you have had women lovers?” she asked.

“Oh yes.” Roberta looked expectant. “Well, there was Angela most recently. I met her in Sydney. She was a brainy scientist type, but a fun-loving one. Or so I thought. Come along to the South Seas, she said, and who could resist?” I thought it best not to go into the details of our expedition. “That’s how it is with me. They come, and they go. Some of them remain friends.” How to explain that neither Nicky nor I really did the girlfriend bit? At least not for very long.