PUTNEY-Considered one of the finest pianists in Europe until her brother Wolfgang came along, Maria Anna Mozart, nicknamed "Nannerl," was born in 1751 in Salzburg, Austria. She was nearly five years older than her brother, and they were both considered musical geniuses.
Her father, Leopold, started her on the piano at age 8. She and her brother performed all over Europe until she was 16, when she stopped performing in public because she was a woman.
To date, all of her music has remained lost to time, and her story was largely forgotten until 10 years ago when Sylvia Milo decided to do something about it.
The award-winning playwright and actor wrote and stars in The Other Mozart and will perform the play about Maria Anna's life at Next Stage Arts on Friday, June 27 and Saturday, June 28.
Milo, on stage in a stunning 18-foot dress that takes up the entire stage, performs a play based on facts, stories, and lines pulled directly from the Mozart family's humorous and heartbreaking letters.
"The play chronicles her whole life," Milo said. "She is here and now. She appears in a big, big dress in front of the audience in this moment. She is a ghost. She comes and tells her story from beginning to the end."
The performance is the result of a 15-year artistic partnership between the performing arts center and Yellow Barn, an international center for chamber music, also based in Putney.
Originally planned for 2020 and postponed due to Covid, The Other Mozart had a critically acclaimed off-off-Broadway run in New York, earning multiple accolades, nominations, and awards.
Imagining a compositional voice
"We are also excited to welcome home Yellow Barn musician Nathan Davis," said Catherine Stephan, executive director.
Davis, married to playwright Milo, was one of the composers charged with creating the music for The Other Mozart. The couple will serve as mentors for participants of Yellow Barn's Young Artists Program, which assembles composers and performers ages 13 to 20.
Each year, "we invite an ensemble or a production to present to the young musicians as a way of inspiring them and opening their ears to something different," Stephan said, and this year Davis and Milo "will be on campus working with the musicians in advance of their production."
Reflecting on his Yellow Barn experience in a recent phone call with The Commons, Davis recalled that in 2000 he was the first percussionist participant there.
"I brought my marimba to Putney and did several chamber music pieces with violin, harp, and harpsichord," he said.
He ended up renting a house in Bellows Falls since he was teaching part time at Dartmouth College, Keene State College, and Franklin Pierce College (now University).
"When I think back to being at Yellow Barn in 2000, the quality of musicianship was so high and not only the individual musicianship but the focus on chamber music playing was so strong there. It was one of my first opportunities play in ensembles," Davis said.
For Davis and co-composer/sound designer Phyllis Chen, creating the music for The Other Mozart was "a daunting task, because first of all there is a Mozart name in there!"
"We know that Nannerl composed, but we don't have any of her music, so her compositional voice had been lost," Davis added. "We wanted to be sure that we didn't compose anything that could be mistaken for classical style, so we portrayed a sense of musical imagination."
He and Chen used only instruments that Nannerl would have played herself, so harpsichord and clavichord feature very prominently, "and music boxes which were very popular at the time," he said. "We used teacups and clock chimes, sounds she would have heard which might have sparked her imagination."
How did Milo know what kind of musician Maria Anna would have been?
"The only thing we know is from a letter from Wolfgang, who said that her music was beautiful, and he encouraged her to compose more," Milo said.
"Her father said she improvised a concerto cadenza beautifully. Some of the early Mozart compositions are in her hand. The kids were traveling together on the early tours, and she would write it out for Wolfgang," she added.
'I wanted to know what the story was'
The idea for the play germinated on a visit to the Mozart homestead in Austria.
"I encountered Nannerl in Vienna on Wolfgang's 250th birthday. I decided to see the city from the point of view of where he lived and where he performed. There is a Mozart House museum, and there was a little picture of the Mozart family. It drew my attention because Nannerl has this enormous hairdo," Milo said with a laugh.
She eyed "a woman next to Wolfgang playing music with him."
"I wanted to know what the story was," Milo said. "I started to learn more, and I was astonished that no one was telling this important story of a woman, a sister of Mozart, a genius child protégé. She was brilliant and she was accomplished and there were reviews and then she disappeared."
And then she turned 16.
"Once she turned a marriageable age, she could not perform professionally, because it would have ruined her reputation, so the only option was for her to teach and perform at unpaid concerts," Milo added.
Sparking conversations
The Other Mozart has been performed more than 350 times globally since it premiered in 2013. Since a recent episode of the PBS series Secrets of the Dead, "Mozart's Sister," was released recently, "there is more interest in this story today," Milo said.
Milo and Davis will also take the play to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland for the full month of August.
Over the years, "we toured the play at festivals around the U.S. We had some productions in Salzburg at the Mozart houses. They were beautiful experiences - being in those places and imagining what she was going through and what was the situation of women was," she added.
Milo and Davis are excited to bring this story to the young musicians of Yellow Barn, where Milo hopes that it will "spark conversations about the disappearance of women throughout history."
"I hope they'll ask: How did she disappear? What made her stop performing? Why don't we have two Mozarts?" she said.
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Yellow Barn and Next Stage present the play The Other Mozart on Friday and Saturday, June 27 and 28, at 7:30 p.m., at Next Stage Arts, 15 Kimball Hill, in Putney.
General admission tickets are $40, but Yellow Barn makes a certain number of reduced-price tickets available and will "make efforts to accommodate all circumstances," the organization notes on its website.
For tickets and information, call 802-387-6637 or visit yellowbarn.org.
For more information about The Other Mozart, visit theothermozart.com.
This Arts item by Victoria Chertok was written for The Commons.