Maria anna mozart siblings \
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The story of Maria Anna Mozart, older sister of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, illustrates how social expectations have limited success for women and girls. She was a musical prodigy, perhaps a better musician than her younger brother, but her career was cut short because at the time, it was not considered acceptable for an adult woman to be a professional musician.
Early Life
Maria Anna Mozart, like her more famous brother Wolfgang, was born in Salzburg, eldest of seven children; only Wolfgang and Anna survived infancy. She was born on July 30, 1751, and her brother (with two children who did not survive born in between) on January 27, 1756. Maria Anna was known within the family as Nannerl.
Her father, Leopold Mozart, was a professional musician. He composed, conducted, and taught, as well as played violin. Her mother, Anna Maria Walburga Mozart, cared for her husband and children lovingly, and she often accompanied them on their musical tours. The difficult birth of Wolfgang left Anna Maria unable to have more children.
Emerging Prodigies
When Maria Anna was seven, her father b
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In your novel Mozart’s Sister, your protagonist, Maria Anna Mozart (nicknamed Nannerl), is denied the spotlight in favor of her talented brother. What drew you to Nannerl’s story?
I was immediately struck when I found out that Mozart had a sister who had been another musical prodigy. I think that it was my sister who first brought her to my attention; we were both studying music and she came across Nannerl in the Maestro’s biographies. Later, I was writing an article for a magazine and in preparing an historical digression I went back to the essay A Room of One’s Own that I had read some time before. In it, Virginia Woolf sketches the biography of William Shakespeare’s imaginary sister-poetess in order to demonstrate that had Shakespeare been born a woman, not only would he not have known success but he would also have come to a bad end. Suddenly the figure of Nannerl flashed before my eyes and I thought to myself, this really happened!
How did you research Mozart’s Sister, which draws heavily on Nannerl’s passion for music?
I had to undertake a large bod
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Mozart &
Material Culture
Musican and sister of W. A. Mozart. A child prodigy, she was involved in the family's concert tours of 1762-1769; she won high praise for taste and execution in keyboard performance but, unlike Mozart, was not presented as a composer although she was given a rudimentary education in composition as references in the family letters show; during the 1770s and early 1780s she gave keyboard lessons to several of the daughters of the Salzburg nobility. Until Mozart moved to Vienna in 1781, he and Nannerl were close. She married Johann Baptist Bechtold von Sonnenburg on 23 August 1784 and moved to St. Gilgen, where Sonnenburg was an administrator; they had three children: Leopold Alois Pantaleon (1785-1840), Johanna (`Jeanette`, 1789-1805), and Maria Babette (1790-1791).
Nannerl played a significant role in the development of Mozart biography after Wolfgang`s death in 1791, in part through reminiscences she wrote in the spring of 1792, and was instrumental in providing the publisher Breitkopf & Härtel with copies of some of Mozart's as-yet unpubli
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