Maria anna mozart compositions
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The story of Maria Anna Mozart, older sister of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, illustrates how social expectations have limited success for women and girls. She was a musical prodigy, perhaps a better musician than her younger brother, but her career was cut short because at the time, it was not considered acceptable for an adult woman to be a professional musician.
Early Life
Maria Anna Mozart, like her more famous brother Wolfgang, was born in Salzburg, eldest of seven children; only Wolfgang and Anna survived infancy. She was born on July 30, 1751, and her brother (with two children who did not survive born in between) on January 27, 1756. Maria Anna was known within the family as Nannerl.
Her father, Leopold Mozart, was a professional musician. He composed, conducted, and taught, as well as played violin. Her mother, Anna Maria Walburga Mozart, cared for her husband and children lovingly, and she often accompanied them on their musical tours. The difficult birth of Wolfgang left Anna Maria unable to have more children.
Emerging Prodigies
When Maria Anna was seven, her father b
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Mozart &
Material Culture
Musican and sister of W. A. Mozart. A child prodigy, she was involved in the family's concert tours of 1762-1769; she won high praise for taste and execution in keyboard performance but, unlike Mozart, was not presented as a composer although she was given a rudimentary education in composition as references in the family letters show; during the 1770s and early 1780s she gave keyboard lessons to several of the daughters of the Salzburg nobility. Until Mozart moved to Vienna in 1781, he and Nannerl were close. She married Johann Baptist Bechtold von Sonnenburg on 23 August 1784 and moved to St. Gilgen, where Sonnenburg was an administrator; they had three children: Leopold Alois Pantaleon (1785-1840), Johanna (`Jeanette`, 1789-1805), and Maria Babette (1790-1791).
Nannerl played a significant role in the development of Mozart biography after Wolfgang`s death in 1791, in part through reminiscences she wrote in the spring of 1792, and was instrumental in providing the publisher Breitkopf & Härtel with copies of some of Mozart's as-yet unpubli
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In 1996, a teen novel entitled The Secret Wish of Nannerl Mozart, by Canadian poet Barbara Kathleen Nickel, was first published (by Sumach Press). And what could the girl’s secret wish be? None other than to become the greatest composer in the world! The novel is based on careful historical research and the appendix contains a timeline, a glossary and a bibliography. The story begins at a time immediately prior to the Mozart family’s departure for the extensive European tour they made between 1763 and 1766, and ends with an imaginary, triumphant concert written by Nannerl and performed by Wolfgang, together with a small group of musician friends — and with Nannerl herself on the violin.
Nannerl also inspired the American poet Sharon Chmielarz, author of the poetry collection The Other Mozart (published in 2001 by Ontario Review Press). This biography in verse covers Nannerl’s life from the time she was a child prodigy to her death as Maria Anna Walburga Ignatia von Berchtold zu Sonnenburg, née Mozart.
In 2005 Alison Bauld, an Australian composer, published t
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