Page 53 - All About History 55 - 2017 UK

The Other Mozart

became more subordinate to her father. Nannerl visited him, he collected musicians together so she
did not marry until she was 33, unusually late for could play with them and even encouraged her to Ask The experT
the era, and there is no good reason for this: she stand up to her husband.
was clever, talented and well-mannered. So the This close relationship with her father distanced Music historian Clif Eisen warns that we
idea that Leopold didn’t want to release his grip on the two siblings further, as Leopold did not at shouldn’t overstate Nannerl’s inluence on
her is not an outrageous one. all approve of his son’s wife, Constanze. The pair her brother’s famous compositions
Nannerl finally moved out of the family home to had very little presence in Wolfgang’s new life, Anyone who reads the news knows
Sankt Gilgen, a rural town east of Salzburg, to live but Nannerl still requested new pieces from her that conspiracy theorists — or just
with her new husband. Her married life was not brother to play. It’s thanks to Nannerl preserving plain unjustified revisionists — are
an easy one — she had to care for five ill-educated this pieces that many of Wolfgang’s cadenzas for plentiful on the ground. They were
stepchildren and, while her brother achieved the piano concertos survive today. in the 18th century, too; you don’t
fame, she relied on her father’s aid. Although it is In the summer of 1785, Nannerl gave birth to have to dig particularly deep to find
easy to look on Leopold with scorn, he obviously her first child, a son, who she named after her all the evidentially-unsupported
was greatly committed to his daughter, as he did father. She had travelled home to Salzburg to give arguments about Wolfgang
shopping for her, arranged servants and paid for birth, and when she returned to Sankt Gilgen she Mozart’s premature death on 5 December 1791, which
her brother’s music to be sent to her. When she did not bring the boy with her. Leopold wanted to claim that he was poisoned by the Masons for revealing
“She was becoming disenchanted with by Italian composer Antonio Salieri.
their secrets in The Magic Flute or killed out of jealousy
One more recent theory has it that Wolfgang’s older
her rebellious little brother” sister Nannerl may have composed some short works in
a musical notebook that belonged to the family and that
was used to teach the young Wolfgang how to play the
keyboard. In this way, she may therefore have played
some role, or had some influence, on the development
Maria Anna was credited as
being particularly good on the of his musical genius.
harpsichord and the fortepiano Martin Jarvis of Charles Darwin University in Australia
claimed that some of the pieces in the notebook are in
Nannerl Mozart’s handwriting — which he believes to
have identified for the first time — and that this raises
the possibility of her authorship.
Alas, it was established more than 25 years ago that
the hand Professor Jarvis identifies as Nannerl’s is,
in fact, the hand of the Mozart family’s regular music
copyist in Salzburg, Joseph Richard Estlinger (see the
lovely facsimile of the notebook published by the
Stiftung Mozarteum in 2010).
What’s more, Nannerl’s hand could not have been
newly identified for the first time — it was already well-
known from copies she made in the 1780s of some of
Wolfgang’s piano concertos that survive in the music
collection at Saint Peter’s Abbey, Salzburg. It is hard
to know what the forensic specialists mentioned by
Professor Jarvis might have taken as their baseline
comparison if they weren’t aware that Nannerl’s musical
handwriting had already been discovered.
Of course, this doesn’t preclude the possibility
that Nannerl might have influenced her little brother
in some way — but it certainly wouldn’t have been
compositionally. In a letter from 1778, Leopold Mozart
wrote to his son, then travelling to Mannheim and Paris,
that he was teaching Nannerl the rudiments of figured
bass and that she was making good progress.
Put another way, Nannerl still hadn’t mastered the
compositional relationship among bass lines, harmonies
and melodies in 1778. That being the case, it’s pretty
unlikely that, in 1760, she could compose even a short,
well-rounded minuet.

Cliff Eisen is Professor of Music
History at King’s College London
and the author of numerous books
and articles on Mozart, including
The Cambridge Mozart Encyclopedia
(Cambridge, 2006) and Mozart: A
Life In Letters (Penguin, 2006).
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