When we hear the name “Mozart,” we think, of course, of Wolfgang Amadeus, the composer whose music and life story remains so present in our modern culture. There was, however, another Mozart: his older sister, Maria Anna “Nannerl” Mozart. Also a musical child prodigy, Nannerl toured Europe with her little brother as a child, playing the piano with exquisite skill. When she became old enough to marry, however, she was taken off the tours, her brother rising higher and higher in the world of music while she was forced to look for a husband as her only means of ensuring security for herself and her family.

In her play The Other Mozart, Sylvia Milo tells the forgotten story of Nannerl, the forgotten Mozart sibling whose musical talents deserve their own place in our culture. Milo sat down with us to help revive Nannerl’s legacy.

How were you drawn to this story and this historical perspective?

Well, I grew up as a classical musician, and I wasn’t hearing anything about women in classical music, especially in my music history classes. I wasn’t playing music by any women composers. Then ten years ago, I travelled to Vienna. Inside the Mozart apartment, which is a museum, I saw a portrait of the Mozart family for the first time. They had a little tiny copy on an exit wall. It was really small, and the only reason I noticed was because there was a woman sitting at a keyboard next to Wolfgang. They looked like equals; their hands were intertwined on the keys. I knew it wasn’t Constanze, the wife, so I started researching the sister. It just really blew me away, that I’d never heard of her, and nobody was talking about her.

We know so much about Wolfgang because he’s so present, still, through his music of course, and then the movie Amadeus, and his tragic story. He’s so much in the popular culture. There’s Rock Me Amadeus in the '80s and everything. It was really telling to me that the story of the sister was unexplored. What I found out was that she was a child prodigy, alongside with him, that they were touring most of Europe as two child prodigies, promoted equally. She was even billed first, because she was five years older and she played better than him at first.

Wolfgang always praised her piano playing, saying that no one played his piano concertos better than she does. And there are reviews of her astonishing performances as a little child. There were two of them, and then she was erased. Just erased. We always see the little Wolfgang playing, in movies and pictures and stories. So that was really something shocking to me, and made me kind of angry. That put me on this quest to tell this story. I think it’s incredibly important to know what happened to someone like that. I grew up hearing things like "women are inferior because women must be inferior, because where are the Mozarts? Where are the Beethovens?" And, well, here is the Mozart.

It’s definitely a really powerful story. And the show focuses a lot on the limitations placed on her because of her gender. What speaks to you most about that part of her experience? 

Wolfgang also didn’t have it easy. As children, they were really under the amazing genius of their father, as a manager of sorts as well as a teacher. He taught them both equally, and at the time that was very rare, that Nannerl had the same education as her brother. Later he started switching a little bit towards what was the reality of their future lives. She was taught the piano, and Wolfgang was taught the other instruments as well. She was taught as a teacher, Wolfgang was taught as a composer. She did compose, and we have proof of that in the form of a letter by Wolfgang praising her composition, though we don’t actually have any of her compositions.

For Wolfgang later on, it became very hard to get a steady position at a court, to be hired as a court composer. He only got it a few months before he died. But what he was able to do with that, being a man, was to basically go out on his own and try things. He was the first successful freelancer composer. He would rent his own concert hall, even have his own harpsichord brought in from his apartment, and he would make an incredible amount of money, actually, for a while. That’s something that she was absolutely unable to do. He was able to break away, rebel, and try to make things on his own in Vienna. Partially he was able to do that because she was in Salzburg taking care of their father.

If she’d gone out on her own like that, it would’ve been a disaster for her whole family. Not just her reputation and her life, but the reputation of the whole family. The repercussions would’ve been huge. Her main way of making sure she was secure was marriage. That was very different between the two of them. What really interests me and what makes me so angry is the artist who was not able to create, who was stopped in the creation. I understand that pain and that longing. It’s just incredibly tragic. We could’ve had two Mozarts.

How do you think the story can connect to modern audiences?

I think it’s important to know history. Even today, the presence of women composers is still very limited. Especially in traditional concert halls, of course. There are groups who are organizing concerts of those forgotten women from the past. There aren’t that many of them, compared to men, and so many of their works have not survived. People didn’t keep them. There’s that issue. But also in regular concert programming, it might as well be called a festival of male composers.

It’s amazing what’s happening with women conductors stepping in more. A reviewer overheard a little girl talking to her brother at a concert, and he was saying, “Conducting sounds really fun! Maybe I should be a conductor.” And the sister responded, “But you’re not a woman! Only women can be conductors!” because they just saw a woman. It’s so important to see women do these things, especially for children, for little girls to be able to think about those kinds of careers. It’s incredibly important to know these stories, to see somebody of our gender in the past and understand. It’s Nannerl’s story and it’s so powerful, but it’s also the story of so many other women who we don’t know about. It’s just very important for women to see themselves in history, and understand the forces that played out in making it impossible for women to create.

You share the role with several other actresses. I saw the wonderful Jody Christopherson perform. What’s it like to develop a role with other actresses?

It’s been a really wonderful process. Sometimes challenging, but really rewarding. Overall, we’ve had six actresses. Every actress is different and she brings something else to the character. For me, it’s a wonderful thing. I wrote the play, I have performed the play, I’ve done all the research, so my understanding of the character is rooted in that, but also of course in my own life story and what I know. So it’s been really interesting to guide the actresses within the historical period and the research. And you have to have a musical ear as an actress to be able to perform it the right way, because the music is like a partner. Once the actress is able to do the skeleton of this, then her personality and her own take on the story really emerges, and it’s fascinating to see how different each Nannerl is, and yet fitting into the period and the story that we are telling. But just a slightly different interpretation on the character, and the possibility within that character.