Although THE VIOLINIST OF VENICE bears an image of a young woman with a low-cut neckline on the cover, it is actually refers to Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741), Priest, Virtuoso Violinist, and Composer.
Yes, Adriana d’Amato can play the violin, and that is how the novel opens when the 18-year-old society beauty finds a way of escaping her father’s oppressive mansion to go to Vivaldi’s house one midnight to beg for a violin lesson.
Vivaldi is impressed with the young woman. Although obviously out of practice (she has not had lessons since she was a child) Vivaldi can recognize a true musician when he sees one. This is someone who is not just technically proficient, not someone who can just play all the notes perfectly, but someone who can delve deeper and recreate the expressive power of the music.
And Adriana is impressed with Vivaldi. Although he is 14 years her senior, he creates the most glorious music in his compositions, and he is the violinist par excellence of Venice. Needless to say, it doesn’t take too long for these characters to fall in love and begin a passionate affair.
But we are in Venice in 1710. Young women from families with aspirations and the aristocrats they aped were not allowed to stray. Adriana’s father Enrico d’Amato is a wealthy merchant. He is not an aristocrat, but he has enough money to buy his daughter a marriage to an aristocrat. And so he locks his daughter up in her rooms, preventing her from participating in any society events, or even having any friends.
But he finds the perfect young man for Adriana in the shape of Tommaso Foscari, scion of an aristocratic Venetian family. Tommaso is about the same age as Adriana, and like her is passionately fond of music. He would have made the perfect husband for her except for the fact that by the time he proposes marriage, she is expecting Vivaldi’s child.
The tension and awfulness of Adriana’s situation ~ pregnant, lonely and entirely in the power of her father who doesn’t hesitate to vent his wrath upon her in a violent rage ~ is given full play by Ms Palombo’s powerful writing. But what I love about this novel is how everything that is so wrong for Adriana at age 18, becomes right twenty years later, when people are able to let the past go and forgive one another.
I see that Alyssa Palombo plays piano and sings, and that might be the reason for the one mistake I could find in this well-researched novel. The keys of C major and A minor are easy to play on the piano. But they are not so easy to play on the violin. Instead, the easiest keys on the violin are those associated with the open strings ~ G major, D major, A major and E major (although E major requires a lot of shifting because it is the top-miost string.) Perhaps this mistake can be corrected in a later edition.
