Spokane author Gregory Spatz is out with a new novel entitled “The Vivaldi Church.” You may be familiar with the Italian composer’s most famous work, “The Four Seasons.”
"I became interested in his life story, which is tragic and interesting and all the things you would expect. He almost died as an infant. He had asthma his whole life. So, they didn't expect him to live, but he did live and then he became a priest as a teenager. He sort of sprinted through seminary and became a priest all the while playing violin," Spatz said.
Vivaldi plays a minor, indirect role in Spatz’s book. He’s part of the supporting cast to fictional characters Spatz created. He also had a very real relationship to other characters Spatz includes. They were female musicians who played all over Venice.
[Editors note: In 17th and 18th century Venice, four "ospedali grandi" were created to care for sick and homeless people, including orphaned children. The facilities employed their own all-female musical ensembles that played for a variety of community and social events.]
This interview is lightly edited for length and clarity.
Gregory Spatz: Their whole system of training these girls and women up through early childhood all the way through, they'd stay their whole lives and play music, do nothing but play music and sing and they could play multiple instruments.
It turns out it's really, really rich and fascinating in the way that the performance had to be done in a sort of an inversion of what we think of as a performance where the women were up in a balcony around the audience, looking down on the audience. Because of the social morals of the time, it was considered like way too suggestive to see a woman play a musical instrument. My God.
They had to be concealed behind this metal grate so you couldn't see them at all and they would perform looking down on their audience and the point of it was this separation from the appearance of the musician and the music so that you would just hear the music and you could fantasize that these were like angels and you see the paintings of them still and all these in the Pieta and many other places in Venice, these sort of imagined cherubs playing music up there in the sky.
In fact, they were probably mostly disfigured and they were people who had been dropped in the Scafetta [where newborns were dropped off to be cared for] because no one knew how to deal with them. No one knew how to deal with their disabilities. So they were probably not beautiful and they stayed their whole lives so they weren't young either. They'd be playing when they're 40, 50 and then they would generally tend to sort of end their careers teaching and passing on basically everything they knew about their instrument to the next generation of teachers.
It's just an amazing, really rich piece of musical history that until pretty recently, people just didn't really pay any attention to, I guess, because of the fact they were women, which makes them not that interesting. But in fact, it's really interesting.
There's some speculation even that that divorce of the appearance of the performer and the music itself invited a kind of mysticism into the music itself and its intention was to invite that sort of mystical religious vibe so the music was about something higher than human experience that that was the bridge between Baroque music and romantic music, that actually they were the bridge between Baroque and romantic periods in history. I don't know if that's true, but it's all really interesting.
[Editors note: In 17th and 18th century Venice, four "ospedali grandi" were created to care for sick and homeless people, including orphaned children. The facilities employed their own all-female musical ensembles that played for a variety of community and social events.]
The more I read about the Ospedali, the more Vivaldi sort of faded into the rear view mirror, even though he was involved, he composed for them and he did show up occasionally and teach violin.
DN: What is the "Vivaldi Church?" We know that he was a priest, but what was "The Vivaldi Church?
GS: Well, there are two of them. There's the one that is incorrectly called the Vivaldi Church, which is the Pieta itself, which is the final performance space for the women of the Pieta. [Editor's note: the Pieta is a famous sculpture by Michelangelo at St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican.]
DN: So a physical space.
GS: It is, yeah. It's a beautiful church that was finished basically at the very end of the time that they were known as a group. So Anna Maria and Chiara [two real-life characters in the book] did get to see it before they died. And it's still there. It's a beautiful place, beautiful space. And they're all painted up there into the fresco on the ceiling and the incoronation of Mary.
So that is called the "Vivaldi Church." And I say incorrectly because Vivaldi was long gone by the time it was built. He never saw it. He had nothing to do with it. But because of the way that people tend to think that the ospedale was like, that Vivaldi had some proprietary involvement with them and people would call them Vivaldi's virgins. No, that's not part of it. That's not part of the story, actually. So people call that the Vivaldi Church.
And the other Vivaldi Church is the Church of St. John the Baptist. It's kind of near the Pieta and it's a funky old building, much older building. That's where he was baptized the second time. They baptized him immediately when he was born because they thought he would die and then he survived. So they had a happier baptism for him a couple months later and that was in the St. John the Baptist Church. That's the actual Vivaldi Church. It's much less dramatic and sort of dark and somber. So we have two physical places.
DN: But what is the meaning of the title of "The Vivaldi Church"? Is it the meaning about a physical place or something different?
GS: Well, it's the story. It's a complicated story to relate.
Basically, one of the main characters is a young woman in the year 2019. She's with her college musical group. They've gone to Venice. They're going to perform there. They're studying the history of the period and her piece of the story begins in the Pieta where she's sitting there trying to commune with apparently the last members of the Choro, which is the name of the group, the women who played at the Pieta. They're all buried in the ground under the church.
She's trying to commune with them because she's heartbroken. She left her boyfriend. She had fallen in love with another woman basically in the last weeks before she headed off to Venice and didn't kind of own up to any piece of the situation, left her boyfriend and her lover back home in Maine, figuring she would just deal with it when she got home. And what do you know?
But the two of them get together and become romantically involved while she's gone and she's just ruined by this. So she's trying to come to terms with that and sort of crying in the church. So that's where it begins.
And at the very end, she and another one of the book's main characters, Peter, end up in the actual Vivaldi Church in the middle of that epic high water event in 2019. I think it was the last acqua alta before they finally figured out how to stop it from happening again, where the water went like really, really, really high. And so they're in that church through that flood together and things happen.
Gregory Spatz is the author of “The Vivaldi Church.” His new novel will be featured at a book launch event at Spokane’s West Central Abbey. That’s Friday, October 16 at 7 pm.
