Amadeus Wolfgang Mozart is often considered the most prolific composer in the history of classical music. But a one-woman show coming to the Yellow Barn on June 27th and 28th focuses on his lesser-known little sister, who trained alongside him as a child before being left behind.
NEPM's John Nowacki spoke with creator Sylvia Milo and composer Nathan Davis about their journey creating the play, 'The Other Mozart.'
John Nowacki, NEPM: You know, everybody pretty much knows who Mozart is. Okay. Right, Wolfgang. But your program explores another Mozart family member entirely. Would you tell us who it is, and how did this program come about?
Sylvia Milo, creator: So my play, The Other Mozart tells the story of the sister of Wolfgang Nannerl. Well, Maria Anna, her nickname was Nannerl. And I found out about her existence when I was visiting Vienna for the 250th anniversary. You know, big celebrations of Wolfgang's birth. And when I went to the Mozart house, there was this tiny little picture of of a painting on a wall. In that painting, there is Wolfgang seated at the piano. And there was a woman next to him. And underneath it said the portrait of the Mozart family. I knew this was not his wife. There was also his father and his mother in the in the portrait. And I thought there must be a sister. And so I set off on a few years of research, and I was just astonished that nobody was telling the story of this other Mozart.
There were two of them. There were two child prodigies. She was four and a half years older than him. And the children were touring throughout Europe, the two of them as the two miracles. And then, you know, he continued. And she was stopped because of her gender.
For this program — and I've seen a picture of this — I understand you perform in a somewhat unusual costume. How does that figure in this story?
Sylvia: So the whole play, it's a solo play and it's set in the dress. So the dress is 16ft in diameter and it lays flat for the most part. At the end I wear it, but it's a whole world, you know. It's that and there's no other set pieces. This is the set and the costume in one. And inside there are packets filled with objects from her life that she uses in a musical way, like a teacup with a teaspoon and the fluttering of the fan and the toy piano. She's contained in this world of the dress. So she basically appears in front of this audience in the dress as a ghost. And and she tells her story.
Nathan, you have written original music for this play. What was the concept of that music? I mean, you could have just used excerpts from other contemporaries, but how did you evoke the period that Nannerl lived in?
Nathan Davis, composer: It was a tall order that that Sylvia requested from me and from Phyllis Chen, who was the other composer. We worked together to create the original score for the other Mozart, and Phyllis and I discussed a lot how to how to portray the music or the voice of someone whose own music and voice had been lost. And it was a really daunting task.
We focused on the instruments that she knew intimately, like the clavichord and the harpsichord, and also objects that might have captured her imagination like teacups or hand fans, church bells, music boxes. One thing that I drew from the script itself, um, early on in the play, Sylvia says, as Nannerl: "I am like that first note of the scale others follow."
So thinking about That image and also the the exercises that were that both of the children would have learned. I worked a lot with ascending scales, kind of dovetailing and climbing and climbing and climbing up toward a glass ceiling, which is eventually broken at the very end.
There's a program that you're going to be participating at Yellow Barn, and that's the Young Artist program. What is that going to be? What are you going to be doing with the with these young people?
Nathan: Yellow barn is a wonderful festival that's been going on for a very long time. And I was a participant at Yellow Barn 25 years ago. We will be doing a workshop with the students on Saturday afternoon about the piece. Mostly a question and answer session and going into more depth about how the piece was created and about the themes that it brings up.
Sylvia, what do you hope audiences will take away from this performance and story?
Sylvia: Well, I would hope that people will be moved and they will think about two things. They will think about what are the other stories that we don't know about. What are those hidden stories? And there's so many women's stories, they're still just not being told. And they're extraordinary stories out there. You know, she was stopped because she was a woman. That was the only reason why we couldn't have had two Mozarts, which is such a loss to our culture as people.
And maybe she was just as brilliant. Maybe she was a little less brilliant, but a little less brilliant than Mozart would have been pretty incredible, too! Maybe she was more brilliant! We don't know. We'll never know. And, you know, for people to think what other people are being stopped right now from from accessing the institutions, the grants for us to actually be able to have their beauty, their contribution to society.
Disclaimer: The Yellow Barn is an underwriter at NEPM. It does not impact the way we cover them.
