The Forgotten Mozart: Wolfgang’s Sister and a Talent Lost Because She Was Born a Woman

A portrait of Maria Anna Mozart attributed to Pietro Antonio Lorenzoni, 1763. Credits: www.infobae.com

Everyone knows Wolfgang Mozart, but very few know that he had a sister, also talented, but censured by the society for being a woman.

Maria Anna Mozart, also known as Nannerl, was born in Salzburg in 1751. Daughter of Leopold Mozart, musician and composer, Nannerl, from a very young age, showed extraordinary talent for the harpsichord and composition, so much so that her father took her on tour across Europe, performing together with her brother Wolfgang.

During these travels, the chronicles of the time recount that Nannerl played with precision and improvised with the same mastery as her brother. However, when Nannerl reached adolescence, due to the conventions of the time, women were not considered suitable to perform and present themselves publicly as musicians, so Nannerl was set aside and forced to stay at home. Her father, while continuing to value the musical abilities of his son, stopped promoting Nannerl and, following the dogmas of society, prevented Nannerl from cultivating her talent, in fact giving up on her. Nannerl accepted the sentence without rebelling and remained at home, devoting herself to teaching and to a life of private composition, compositions of which, however, we have no trace since they were all lost and not preserved.

In 1784, at the age of 33, she married an officer, not for love, but also in this case for social convention, it would not have been accepted by the family for her to remain an unmarried woman. But having been widowed a few years later, Nannerl spent the rest of her life in relative anonymity, close to a religious environment without ever taking vows. She died in 1829, a full twenty years after her brother, and her death passed almost unnoticed. She left no trace of a musical career worthy of note, except for a few letters and some testimonies that remembered her as the sister of Mozart.

Despite her talent, Nannerl was never able to emerge on a par with her brother. And this is not an isolated case, but the reflection of a system that, in the eighteenth century, gave no space to women to express their own skills. The story of Nannerl shows how the societies over times, unfortunately, placed restraints on women in every field, not only arts, but scientific too, as shine in something was considered inappropriate for the female gender. Hers is a career interrupted not by a lack of ability, but by the fact of being born a woman in a society with imposed rigidities.

Today, her story should make us reflect. How many other women did not have the opportunity to shine in some field simply because they were women? How many works of art or discoveries have we lost? How many stories like this have happened and of which we have no record?

Her story is that of all the women who never had the opportunity to write their own name in history, and even today in many parts of the world the very same thing is happening.