It’s 1763 and Leopold Mozart is dragging his precocious child across Europe, touting his offspring’s musical gifts to the good and the great. The Mozarts are on the road for more than three years. Five months in Paris, a year in London, a sweep through Germany, Switzerland, Belgium. In the Netherlands, Leopold’s child catches typhoid and is served the last sacrament but eventually rallies, so the tour continues. Everywhere they go there is music, and the child prodigy Maria Anna Mozart, known to family as Nannerl, is the toast of the continent.
It’s a true story. Nannerl’s little brother, Wolfgang Amadeus, was there too, of course. However, Mozart’s Sister, a new documentary by Australian film-maker Madeleine Hetherton-Miau that features in this year’s Doc Edge Festival, seeks to pull Maria Anna out from Wolfgang’s shadow.
“Nannerl is an interesting woman in her own right,” Hetherton-Miau says. “She had a remarkable childhood. Even if her brother hadn’t been who he was, she would still have been a prodigy.”
Nannerl never had a hope of becoming an adult musician, though. Her touring career was over by 1769, when she was 18 and of a marriageable age. Although the documentary is suffused with music, none of it is Maria Anna’s. We know she composed, because Wolfgang sent letters praising her talents, though nothing survives. Wolfgang died in 1791 aged 36. Nannerl lived to be 78, but Mozart’s Sister implies that both careers ended too soon.
“I feel an acute sense of injustice,” Hetherton-Miau says. “Maria Anna was a talented young woman who would have had the same hopes and dreams as anybody, and was on the cusp of realising them, when she just got too old and had to go home and essentially keep house.”
However, Hetherton-Miau says the documentary is not just about one woman’s thwarted talent more than 200 years ago. “We still have a problem that there are very few female composers today, and that not much music by women is played, so the story becomes timely.”
Which is why she selected Alma Deutscher, herself a child prodigy as player and composer, and now aged 19, to narrate Mozart’s Sister.
“There’s research around how hard it is to transition from prodigy to adult,” says Hetherton-Miau. “[Wolfgang] Mozart made that transition, Alma’s making it. There’s a parallel there, and she speaks to Anna’s and Wolfgang’s stories. The point of Alma being in the documentary is that I was hoping to find a way to celebrate not what we did wrong [with Maria Anna], but to look positively to the future and what we could have.”
Mozart’s Sister plays at the Doc Edge Festival in Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland, and via on-demand streaming. See docedge.nz for details.
