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Vivaldi's Virgins by Barbara Quick

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Rowan
Bibliophile
Posts: 1462
Joined: August 2008
Interest in HF: I love history, but it's boring in school. Historical fiction brings it alive for me.
Preferred HF: Iron-Age Britain, Roman Britain, Medieval Britain
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Vivaldi's Virgins by Barbara Quick

Post by Rowan » Mon June 13th, 2016, 4:08 pm

This book is a lovely story of world famous composer Antonio Vivaldi, told through the eyes of one of his students, Anna Maria dal Violin, an orphan at Ospedale della Pietà in Venice, Italy. The story cleverly unfolds as though it is solely about Anna Maria who comes to be one of Vivaldi's prize students and seemingly the only musician who can play as well as the maestro himself, however in the end, as Anna Maria herself states, her story is his story.

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Two things I learned while reading this book: 1. Vivaldi was a priest. He worked at the Ospedale as a maestro as well as composer. He occasionally led mass, but got to the point where he'd dash off in the middle of a sermon to go jot down notes in a new composition that they just had him teach. 2. The majority of his compositions were written specifically for the young musicians at the Ospedale.

I would highly recommend this book as a light read. It's most definitely historical fiction, but as I have found with a lot of historical fiction, there's a lot of thinking involved. A lot of having to remember who is related to who and how it all relates to a bigger picture. This is just a simple story, well told and enjoyable.

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