Maria Anna Mozart

• 1. Introduction

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  Maria Anna Walburga Ignatia Mozart, known to the world as Nannerl, was born in Salzburg on the 30th of July 1751. By age eleven, newspapers across Europe were running notices about a girl who could play the harpsichord and fortepiano with what one Augsburg paper called "an almost incredible ease." Baron Friedrich Melchior Grimm, writing in his Correspondance littéraire on the 1st of December 1763, described her as playing "the longest and most difficult pieces with an astonishing precision." The same dispatches that celebrated Nannerl always went on to praise her younger brother, Wolfgang Amadeus. That single fact contains the whole shape of her life. She was first. Then she became secondary. Then she became invisible. How did the most celebrated young female keyboard player in Europe end up practicing three hours a day in a single-windowed room, in a village she called a wilderness, while the scores of her brother's concertos traveled to her rolled up in a backpack alongside candles and lard? That is the question Nannerl's story asks, and it does not have a comfortable answer.

• 2. The Child Prodigy

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  Leopold Mozart began teaching his daughter the harpsichord when she was seven years old. She progressed so rapidly that her three-year-old brother Wolfgang started watching the lessons, and Leopold soon began teaching him as well. By age thirteen, Leopold wrote in a letter dated the 8th of June 1764 that Nannerl was "one of the most skillful pianists in Europe."

  Leopold organized a series of concert tours that brought the Mozart children before the courts and concert halls of the continent. The family first traveled to Munich in January 1762, then to Vienna from the 18th of September 1762 to the 5th of January 1763, then on a three-year grand tour of northwestern Europe that ran from the 9th of June 1763 to the 29th of November 1766, with long stays in London and Paris. The Paris Avant-coureur, on the 5th of March 1764, wrote of Nannerl that "no one could have a more precise and brilliant execution." Baron Grimm returned to the subject in his Correspondance littéraire on the 1st of July 1766, noting that Nannerl, "now thirteen years of age, and moreover grown much prettier, has the most beautiful and most brilliant execution on the harpsichord."

  The tours were not without danger. In November 1765, during a stop in the Hague, Nannerl fell so gravely ill that her parents changed doctors at the last minute to save her life. She received the Roman Catholic sacrament of extreme unction, and afterward she was "nothing but skin and bones" and had to learn to walk again. A second serious illness struck both children in November 1767, when the family visited Vienna during a smallpox epidemic; the illness itself took hold while the Mozarts were in Olomouc, having tried to flee the disease. A final journey to Vienna ran from the 11th of September 1767 to the 5th of January 1769, but by then Nannerl no longer qualified as a prodigy and performed little.

• 3. The Career Cut Short

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  Toward the end of the grand tour, Leopold turned his attention to what would become of his two exceptional children. For Wolfgang, he had a clear goal: a Kapellmeister position, which would bring steady income and allow him to support the family as his parents aged. For Nannerl, the path was different. As biographer Halliwell writes, "There was now an essential difference between her and Wolfgang which was caused by her sex and not by the fact that his talent was superior."

  The only professional positions genuinely open to women in music were in singing, which was not Nannerl's strength. Leopold instead prepared her for piano teaching, with occasional performance as a supplement. Halliwell notes that Nannerl at fifteen had her "most dazzling days" behind her. Wolfgang continued to travel with their father on three separate journeys to Italy, while Marianne, as she came to be called in adulthood, remained at home in Salzburg with her mother.

  The resignation required was enormous. Halliwell quotes a pointed summary: Marianne "was forced to adopt a passive attitude, waiting until a man could provide the salary and the place of abode which would enable her to practise in the limited way described." At age seventeen, her career as a touring musician was over.

• 4. Life in Salzburg

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  After the final Vienna visit, Marianne lived in Salzburg until her marriage in 1784. From 1773 onward, the family moved from their cramped earlier quarters into the more spacious Tanzmeisterhaus, which included a large salon built for dancing. The household was sociable: theater visits when a company was in town, frequent friends, and much music-making. The Mozart family befriended Emanuel Schikaneder, who would later collaborate with Wolfgang, when Schikaneder brought his theater troupe to Salzburg. Sundays often meant Bölzlschiessen, a form of recreational dart shooting, followed by a walk in Mirabell Park.

  Marianne began teaching piano in Salzburg in 1772. Her students were drawn from the aristocracy and the well-off middle class; one source names Count Lodron's daughters among them. Family friend Albert von Mölk testified that her former students could be identified by "the care, precision, and correct fingering in their playing." Diary entries from 1783 show that she was an early teacher of Joseph Wölfl, who went on to become a celebrated virtuoso.

  Wolfgang's departure for Vienna in 1777 on a job-hunting tour left Marianne managing many of her mother's domestic duties. Leopold wrote to his wife on the 27th of October 1777 that Nannerl was "astonishingly diligent, hard-working, and attentive to everything that concerns housekeeping." Her mother never came home from that journey; Anna Maria Mozart died in Paris in 1778. In 1781, Marianne made what turned out to be the last trip of her life outside the Salzburg area, traveling to Munich to attend the premiere of Wolfgang's opera Idomeneo at Carnival time and then visiting Augsburg to perform with him. For the journey she made what she herself called a "very extravagant purchase," a dress costing 70 florins.

• 5. Exile in St. Gilgen

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  On the 23rd of August 1784, Marianne, aged 33, married a magistrate and settled in St. Gilgen, a village roughly 29 kilometers east of Salzburg. Her new husband held the position of Pfleger, the local representative of the Salzburg government, a demanding role. The same position had been held by Marianne's maternal grandfather, Wolfgang Nikolaus Pertl, from 1716 to 1724. The residence itself, built in 1720, was the house where Marianne's own mother had spent her first four years.

  Her husband was twice a widower with five children from previous marriages. Marianne bore three children of her own: Leopold Alois Pantaleon, born in 1785; Jeanette, born in 1789; and Marie Babette, born in 1790. The marriage was not easy. Her stepchildren were described as often ill-behaved and disrespectful, and her husband was not always reasonable with her.

  Marianne worked hard to retain her identity as a serious musician in a place she called a "wilderness." Leopold gave her a new fortepiano as a wedding present, built by the incoming Salzburg court instrument-maker Johann Evangelist Schmidt. Berchtold provided a small room in the house for her to play in; it had a single window and also contained a bed. Marianne practiced three hours a day. Keeping the instrument in working order was its own challenge: the damp lakeside environment caused problems with the piano action, and Schmidt eventually made the six-hour journey from Salzburg with Leopold to put the instrument back in order.

  Wolfgang's new concerto scores reached her by an unlikely route. He would send them to Leopold, who had the parts copied and then dispatched them to St. Gilgen via a weekly official messenger service or by a woman who carried glassware between the two towns. The concertos arrived rolled up in a backpack, alongside candles, lard, and other goods ordered by people along the route. In 1792, her husband was elevated to the nobility as a Freiherr, making Marianne a baroness and adding the honorific "von Berchtold zu Sonnenberg" to her name.

• 6. Siblings and Silence

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  During their childhood, the four-and-a-half-year age gap between Marianne and Wolfgang had been bridged by an extraordinary closeness. According to biographer Maynard Solomon, Wolfgang at age three was inspired to study music by watching his father teach Marianne; he wanted to be like her. The two invented a secret language and an imaginary kingdom they called the Kingdom of Back, of which they were king and queen.

  As Wolfgang's career flourished in Vienna, he continued to send Marianne compositions she could perform at home: the Prelude and Fugue in C, K. 394, in 1782; the four Preludes K. 395/300g, written in 1777; and copies of his piano concertos up to No. 21. When sending the concerto scores, Wolfgang took the care to write out the cadenzas he would have played from memory or improvisation. Those written copies, which Marianne preserved, are the reason pianists can perform the authentic Mozart cadenzas today.

  Yet a widely noted fact about this relationship is that the last letter from Wolfgang to Marianne is dated 1788, three years before his death. In a letter to Friedrich Schlichtegroll in 1792, Marianne explained simply: "Because he wasn't at all a lover of writing, I received no more letters from him after 1788." Scholars disagree on whether a serious rupture occurred. Otto Jahn suggested reasons including Wolfgang's departure from family life in Vienna, Marianne's coolness toward his wife Constanze, and friction over the disposal of Leopold's estate after his death on the 28th of May 1787. Solomon notes that after Wolfgang's 1783 visit to Salzburg, the two never met again and never saw each other's children. In 1800, reading Franz Xaver Niemetschek's 1798 biography of Wolfgang for the first time, Marianne wrote that it had "so completely reanimated my sisterly feelings toward my so ardently beloved brother that I was often dissolved in tears," since it was only then that she learned about "the sad condition in which my brother found himself."

• 7. Return and Later Years

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  When her husband died in 1801, Marianne returned to Salzburg. She resumed teaching, and among her students during this period was Anna Sick, who went on to become the court pianist at Stuttgart. Marianne also returned to performing, notably in concerts at Prince Ernst von Schwarzenberg's. Friedrich von Spaur wrote a positive notice describing her as belonging among "the best musical talents who grace the city of Salzburg."

  She met Wolfgang's son Franz Xaver Mozart, whom she had never seen before and who lived at the time in Lemberg, the city now known as Lviv. She used the opportunity to tell him about his father's childhood and to introduce him to family friends. When Constanze Nissen, Wolfgang's widow by her first marriage, settled in Salzburg in 1820 with her second husband Georg Nikolaus Nissen, Marianne shared her extensive collection of Mozart letters and memorabilia with them, despite the fact that the two women had never been close and had not been in contact. That collection became a foundation of the finished biography and of all subsequent Mozart scholarship.

  In her final years, Marianne's health declined steadily, and she became blind in 1825. Mary Novello, visiting in 1829, described her as "blind, languid, exhausted, feeble and nearly speechless," and formed the mistaken impression she was impoverished. In fact, Marianne was frugal and left a fortune of 7,837 florins. She died on the 29th of October 1829, aged 78, and was buried in St Peter's Cemetery in Salzburg. Her brother's cadenzas, traveling in her handwriting, outlived them both.