Lisa Cox, a retired teacher/professor, writes cultural criticism and commentary in "Thoughts and Critiques," her blog about theater and the arts, where this essay first appeared. The Other Mozart was co-presented by Yellow Barn and Next Stage Arts and was performed on June 27 and 28.
BRATTLEBORO-"Nobody saved my letters. There was nothing interesting in them," laments Nannerl Mozart, as imagined by Sylvia Milo in her remarkable performance piece, The Other Mozart, recently performed at Next Stage in Putney.
Maria Anna Mozart, known as Nannerl to her family, was four years older than her brother, Wolfgang, and similarly gifted as a performer. Their father, Leopold, took them on tour through the great music capitals of Europe while they were both still children, and contemporary notices often spoke of her brilliance on the keyboard.
Though Leopold himself once called her one of the most skillful pianists in Europe, that did not prevent him from insisting that she end her public performances once she reached marriageable age.
Wolfgang would go on performing, composing, and auditioning for a court position. Nannerl was to stay home, attract a good husband, and perhaps supplement the family's income through teaching.
Milo herself plays Nannerl in a show where costume and set are one and the same. Covering the entire stage is a voluminous dress whose center rests on a metallic corset. She begins this one-woman show in period undergarments, traversing the enormous dress, finding letters and other objets de mémoire in its folds. The dress becomes, in effect, a kind of embodied archive of her life.
She reads portions of these letters as she pulls them from the folds of the dress, inhabiting the voices of others in her life. The family letters represent the emotional ties - ties in every sense of the word - that bind her to her family. The brilliant and exasperating Wolfgang is a constant presence - the "little shit," as she calls him with both irritation and affection.
It is only as her life begins to constrict - marriage, motherhood, exile to a cultural backwater - that she kneels in the center of the stage and encloses herself in the corset, donning the massive dress. At this moment, the dress fully becomes her gorgeous prison, both beautiful and oppressive. The dress is costume, character, and fate all at once.
At the end, she rises with the corset and dress. Arms outstretched, she slowly revolves as she makes her way upstage before the lights black out. It's a strikingly beautiful gesture.
How to interpret it? It's neither triumphal nor tragic. It feels as though she has taken on the burden of the dress, accepting with resignation and dignity her reduced role in the world.
* * *
I had expected to find a quiet fury at the heart of this imaginative exploration of the life of Wolfgang Mozart's older sister. Perhaps my expectation was colored by having just reread "A Room of One's Own," Virginia Woolf's seminal exploration of why so few women artists have emerged from our cultural tradition. Woolf's elegant irony never disguises her rage, and I think I went to the show already angry on Nannerl's behalf.
But The Other Mozart is subtler than that. Milo doesn't portray Nannerl as a thwarted genius equal to her brother. What she gives us instead is powerful enough: a portrait of an exceptionally gifted woman, fully equipped by training and temperament to live a creative life until social expectations stopped her.
Her life, though, was not simply tragic. Following the death of her husband, she returned to Salzburg and to teaching piano - a modest but not entirely unsatisfying life, it would seem.
In the quiet close, Nannerl tells us that her tombstone identifies her as the sister of Wolfgang. And she notes with a laugh that Michael Haydn is buried in the same cemetery, himself identified as the brother of the much more famous Joseph. At first blush, we may realize that some men, too, live in the shadow of their brilliant siblings.
But no - that analogy won't hold. Michael was not the brilliant composer his brother was, but he still had a career, and his compositions have survived.
And it's here that Nannerl's observation feels most poignant, where she differs from Michael Haydn.
As Milo has her say with a rueful look at her brother's success, "Could it have been mine? Could - even a little of it - have been mine?"
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