Looking for Mozart's Sister

L-r: Portrait of Maria Anna (Nannerl) Mozart at Mozart's place of birth, Salzburg; House in St Gilgen where Nannerl lived after she married; Nannerl's and Michael Hayden's grave at St Peter's Monastery, Salzburg

I grew up playing the piano, as did my mother, my uncle and my grandmother. By the time I was eighteen, I was studying full time at the conservatorium of music, performing in recitals, singing in choirs, earning a little money accompanying opera singers, and even harbouring dreams of one day becoming a concert pianist.

When I was nineteen, we moved to Australia, and life took me in other directions. There were many reasons for that, but the truth is it didn’t take me long to work out that I lacked the time, talent and discipline needed to succeed in this field here, where the standard was so much higher than I was used to. Yet classical music always remained in my life in the form of live concerts, which I regularly experience from the audience rather than the stage.

As a student, I read a lot about Vienna, which at one time was the musical heart of Europe. Many of my favourite composers - Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, flocked to that city during the Viennese classical period. Last year, I decided to visit Vienna, and back in August, started to plan my trip. I added Warsaw to the itinerary, where Chopin lived for sixteen years, and Prague, which was home to Dvořák and Smetana. But my first stop was Salzburg, Mozart’s city of birth.

Soon after booking the flights, I saw Mozart’s Sister, an investigative documentary about the life of Maria Anna Mozart, nicknamed ‘Nannerl’. I knew that both siblings performed together, and that Nannerl was part of the relentless three and a half year tour of 88 cities that the Mozart family did in 1763, when both children were hailed as child prodigies.

However, I didn’t know that she was a gifted composer in her own right, and possibly as talented as her brother. While touring, the children penned many musical collaborations together, to while away the hours between concerts. But as soon as she became a teenager, she was excluded from the tours, because she was no longer a ‘child prodigy’; and discouraged from pursuing a career in music due to her gender. The documentary revealed that forensic document specialists are finding evidence that some compositions that were attributed to Wolfgang might have been hers. This is not to say that he stole them, as letters attest that she sent them to him for his opinion and he always spoke highly of her talent. It is thought that they might have been signed with his name so they would see the light of day.

I became a huge fan of Nannerl, and my trip to Salzburg acquired a different meaning. When I was there in April, visiting the house where Wolfgang was born and the apartment where he lived in his youth with his family, I found myself looking for traces of Nannerl, hungry to learn more about her. I imagined her languishing in that apartment, looking after her ailing, despotic father while Wolfgang flourished in Vienna. I noticed that while Wolfgang is, to this day, celebrated as the most prominent Salzburgian, very little is said about her, outside the context of being his sister.

In her thirties, Nannerl married an older man chosen by her father, and the couple moved to the coastal village of St Gilgen, where there was no music scene to speak of. On my fourth day in Salzburg, I followed her trail and caught a bus to this lakeside town. It was a Monday and everything was closed, so I was free to roam the streets without encountering the usual crowds. I fell in love with this Alpine village, snuggled between lake Wolfgang (which is not named after the composer but after a saint) and the snowy mountains, and wished I could stay more than a few hours. Although I couldn’t visit the house where Nannerl lived—now a museum, and closed on Mondays—I did get to see it from the outside and appreciate that St Gilgen wasn’t the tiny fishing village I imagined, but one of the most picturesque towns in that part of Austria.
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I was also unexpectedly moved when I found Nannerl’s grave, next to Michael Haydn’s, completely by chance while exploring the beautiful St Peter’s Abbey and Cemetery in Salzburg. I had found Mozart’s sister! When I looked for information on where Wolfgang’s grave was, I was surprised to learn that he was buried in a communal, unmarked grave in St. Marx cemetery in Vienna, and that the exact location is not known (there’s a monument where they think the approximate site is). It felt poignant knowing that Nannerl rests in a marked grave, while the brother who overshadowed her in life and after, lies forever in anonymity.