Published by Orchard
Likely to work for anyone aged over about 8 or 9, this exquisite succinct historical novel brings together several arts so it should be perfect for Ink Pellet readers and their pupils and students.
Heartsong explores the life of a mute musician, an orphan at the famous Ospedale della Pieta in early eighteenth century Venice. Vivaldi was teaching there and writing music for his select group of 70 “daughters of music” to play. The character of Laura stems from a name and a note Jane Ray found in the Ospedale archives in a Venetian museum. A first person narrative loosely structured around the four seasons of Vivaldi’s best known piece, Laura’s inner voice begins with the arrival of babies. Then she moves on to meeting the kindly Vivaldi, being taken out into the city clandestinely as chaperone to an older girl who wants to meet her boyfriend and playing in Vivaldi’s orchestra. It’s original, imaginative, gentle (kindly nuns with a sense of humour) and very compelling. By implication, moreover, it argues strongly for the crucial importance of music as a means of communication.
Jane Ray’s illustrations are sumptuously beautiful but, I’m afraid, jarringly inaccurate in places. The text tells us Laura is a flautist but all the illustrations show her playing a recorder. Yes, Vivaldi wrote for recorder but it was called the fistula anglica. The transverse flute, by then simply called a flute, was the norm in orchestras by the end of Vivaldi’s life. There is also clumsiness in the string player illustrations. Cellists do not clutch their bows in their fists, for instance. Violinists arch their fingers over the strings. It doesn’t spoil a delightful book but I find it extraordinary that these things weren’t spotted and dealt with before publication.
Review by Susan Elkin