YellowBarnBlog

Who is the other Mozart?

Saturday, June 28, 2025

Nannerl Mozart was a child prodigy like her brother Wolfgang Amadeus, but her musical career came to an end when she was 18. A one-woman play puts her back on the stage. In September 2015, on the occasion of the 100th performance of her play The Other Mozart, actress Sylvia Milo writes about her inspiration and process.

"I am writing to you with an erection on my head and I am very much afraid of burning my hair”, wrote Nannerl Mozart to her brother Wolfgang Amadeus. What was being erected was a large hairdo on top of Nannerl’s head, as she prepared to pose for the Mozart family portrait.

It was that hairdo that drew my attention. Nine years ago I was visiting Vienna for the 250th birthday celebrations of Wolfgang Amadeus, and I was thrilled to explore the city following in Wolfi’s footsteps, many of which turned out to be Nannerl’s as well. At the Mozarthaus Vienna – Wolfgang’s apartment – on the exit wall, as if by an afterthought, there was a little copy of the Mozart family portrait. I saw a woman seated at the harpsichord next to Wolfgang, their hands intertwined, playing together. I grew up studying to become a violinist. Neither my music history nor my repertoire included any female composers. With my braided hair I was called “little Mozart” by my violin teacher, but he meant Wolfi. I never heard that Amadeus had a sister. I never heard of Nannerl Mozart until I saw that family portrait.

I was intrigued and determined to find out more. I read Wolfgang Mozart biographies, studied the situation of women and female artists during Mozarts’ time and in different countries, read writings of Enlightenment philosophers, conduct manuals … But the richest source of information came from the Mozart family letters. There are hundreds, and we have them because Nannerl preserved them. Most are written by Leopold and Wolfgang but some of Nannerl’s letters survived as well. Through these letters, sometimes only from the replies to her lost letters, Nannerl slowly emerged. I was able to understand the Mozarts as people, as a family, and through the lens of the times and the social situation in which they lived. I saw Nannerl’s potential, her dreams, her strength, grace and her fight.

Maria Anna (called Marianne and nicknamed Nannerl) was – like her younger brother – a child prodigy. The children toured most of Europe (including an 18-month stay in London in 1764-5) performing together as “wunderkinder”. There are contemporaneous reviews praising Nannerl, and she was even billed first. Until she turned 18. A little girl could perform and tour, but a woman doing so risked her reputation. And so she was left behind in Salzburg, and her father only took Wolfgang on their next journeys around the courts of Europe. Nannerl never toured again.

But the woman I found did not give up. She wrote music and sent at least one composition to Wolfgang and Papa – Wolfgang praised it as “beautiful” and encouraged her to write more. Her father didn’t, as far as we know, say anything about it.

Did she stop? None of her music has survived. Perhaps she never showed it to anybody again, perhaps she destroyed it, maybe we will find it one day, maybe we already did but it’s wrongly attributed to her brother’s hand. Composing or performing music was not encouraged for women of her time. Wolfgang repeatedly wrote that nobody played his keyboard music as well as she could, and Leopold described her as “one of the most skilful players in Europe”, with “perfect insight into harmony and modulations” and that she improvises “so successfully that you would be astounded”.

Like Virginia Woolf’s imagined Shakespeare’s sister, Nannerl was not given the opportunity to thrive. And what she did create was not valued or preserved – most female composers from the past have been forgotten, their music lost or gathering dust in libraries. We will never know what could have been, and this is our loss.

Director Isaac Byrne and I searched for the ghost of Nannerl, and the story she needed to tell in my one-woman play. Period-style movement transports us to the Mozarts’ time using delicate gestures, court bows and curtsies, and the language of fans.

To create the 18th-century world of opulence and of restriction, the set became an enormous dress which spills over the entire stage (designed by Magdalena Dabrowska), with a corset/panniers cage on top. Finally the hair stands as tall as Nannerl’s, after we found the right hairspray to hold it all up-up-up – and yes, it is all my own hair.

Creating music for the show was down to two composers, Nathan Davis and Phyllis Chen, who chose, rather than to try to re-create Nannerl’s compositions, to portray her musical imagination, using the sounds she would have had in her ears: the fluttering of fans, tea cups, music boxes, bells, clavichords.

I’ve been touring The Other Mozart for the last two years: this month marks its 100th performance, how fitting that it will take place just a few steps away from where Nannerl performed in London as a girl.

It has been a long journey to bring Nannerl back to England after an absence of 250 years. I sometimes feel like Leopold Mozart – on a quest to show the world this brilliant Mozart.

"Harriet, Scenes from the Life of Harriet Tubman"

Thursday, July 20, 2023

On July 30th Yellow Barn's will present the American Premiere of Hilda Paredes' Harriet, Scenes from the Life of Harriet Tubman at the 2023 Summer Gala, followed by a general performance on July 31st. How did Harriet come to be, and what does it mean to perform it at a chamber music festival?

Hilda Paredes said, "After being invited by Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México to write a new opera, I asked my friend Claron McFadden if she would like to feature in this project and she immediately introduced me to Harriet Tubman. A six-year journey began then, discovering the extraordinary life and personality of Harriet Tubman. I always say and still think that if she had lived in the twentieth century she would have been awarded the Nobel peace prize."

After which Claron offered the following response by Zoom from Barcelona:

Find out more about the performance of Harriet at our Summer Gala on Sunday, July 30

Find out more about the general performance on Monday, July 31

Lei Liang's Six Seasons

Thursday, July 13, 2023
Yellow Barn’s 54th summer festival features three unique opportunities to experience Lei Liang’s extraordinary “Six Seasons” (2022) for improvising musicians and pre-recorded sounds.
 
On Thursday, July 13, Yellow Barn’s festival concert will include three of Liang’s “Six Seasons” on the Big Barn stage. Yellow Barn will also set up a “listening room” between July 14 and 16 from 9:30am - 5:00pm where audience members can immerse themselves fully in Liang’s ice soundscapes. On Sunday, July 16 at 2pm, we will host a “Patio Noise” virtual discussion with Lei and Dr. Joshua Jones, the oceanographer with whom he collaborated to create this special piece.
 
 
 
Season 5: Cacophony (Image from the Chukchi Sea)
 
Six Seasons represents the culmination of a years-long collaboration between Liang, the inaugural Research Artist in Residence at the Qualcomm Institute (QI) and Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Music at UC San Diego, and oceanographers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
 
In composing Six Seasons, Lei Liang used environmental sounds recorded from hydrophones under the remote Chukchi Sea to tell an urgent and breathtaking story about our oceans. “Working with Professor Liang has transformed sound recordings that we typically think of as data into a personal experience of the underwater world deep within the Arctic Ocean,” said Jones. “It’s been extremely meaningful and we’re asking new research questions as a result.”
 
The work’s six movements reflect the Inuit categorization of the seasons, marked not by numerical dates but by environmental changes both audible and inaudible (In Liang’s terms, ice is the “living score” by which the Inuit live their lives; in Six Seasons, it also becomes a “living score” for improvising musicians to listen and respond to. “These sounds call for a different way of listening, challenging our temporal and spatial orientations,” Liang has said. “Increasingly, these sounds are drowned out by anthropogenic noises including industrial activities and passing ships. Today, we can no longer presume any empathy with the ocean merely from the comfort and the fixed perspective of a beach chair: our oceans are in crisis."

Music Haul Flip Side: Baltimore

Tuesday, July 4, 2023

"Every citizen a storyteller." On this Fourth of July we cannot resist remembering our incredible Flip Side poets. We are proud to share their work with you, alongside Jennifer Curtis, violinCharles Overton, harp, and Chase Morrin, piano. Thank you to the families of Saint Luke's Youth Center and The Park School of Baltimore. As CJ Williams proclaims at the end of his poem to Langston Hughes and Beethoven: "Baltimore is beautiful!"

In the spring of 2023, Yellow Barn launched Music Haul: Flip Side Baltimore. Responding to the poetry of Langston Hughes and music of Ludwig van Beethoven, ten young poets from St. Luke’s Youth Center and the Park School of Baltimore spent six weeks writing and collaborating with Yellow Barn musicians to bring the work of these two great creative voices, and their shared dream for humanity, into our lives. Their collective journey culminated on May 10th in Kirby Lane Park.

Learn more about Yellow Barn Music Haul's Flip Side: Baltimore

Yellow Barn’s 2023 Summer Artwork

Thursday, May 25, 2023
 
We could not be more honored to announce that this year's summer artwork is the creation of our dear friend and colleague of many years, Brian Cohen. Six of Brian's watercolors (2011-2016) will be incorporated into our season materials, including this commemorative poster. (To purchase a poster, write to us at info@yellowbarn.org.)
 
"Shut your eyes, wait, think of nothing. Now, open them ... one sees nothing but a great colored undulation...an irradiation and glory of color. This is what a picture should give us…a colored state of grace." (Paul Cezanne)
 
I had been working in black and white for over twenty years before returning to my earlier infatuation with color. My watercolors are done on site, usually fairly quickly. I apply paint into wet paper, timing the drying of the paper as I lay in new washes of color. Painting in the landscape lets me sit happily observing light, color, and shape, simplifying or obscuring detail in favor of larger forms and the broader swell of color. I aim for a “color chord" or harmony that speaks of time, light, and distance all at once.
 
—Brian Cohen
 
 
About the Artist
 
Brian D. Cohen is an educator, printmaker and painter. He founded Bridge Press in 1989 to further the association and integration of visual image, original text, and book structure. His books and etchings are held by major private and public collections throughout the country, including his artist book of Pierrot Lunaire, which he created in 2003 to accompany a performance of Schoenberg's work at Yellow Barn. Brian was also part of Beethoven InSight, a group of four local artists brought together by Yellow Barn to create a body of work in honor of, and in response to, Beethoven's music and his creative process in honor of the composer's 250th birthday.
 
Artist’s books and prints by Brian D. Cohen have been shown in over forty individual exhibitions, including a retrospective at the Fresno Art Museum, and in over 200 group shows.  Cohen's books and etchings are held by major private and public collections throughout the country, including Yale, Harvard, Brown, and Stanford Universities, Middlebury, Smith, Wellesley, Swarthmore, and Dartmouth Colleges, the University of Vermont, The New York Public Library, The Library of Congress, and the Philadelphia and Portland (Oregon) Museums of Art, as well as the United States Ambassador's residence in Egypt. Brian was the first-place winner of major international print competitions in San Diego, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC., was awarded the Best Book in Show at the Pyramid Atlantic Book Fair, and has received grants from the Vermont Arts Council and the Vermont Community Foundation. He was the Dean of Faculty at the Putney School, and the founding director of the Putney School Summer Programs from 1987 until 2001, and was the founding artistic director of the Two Rivers Printmaking Studio in White River Junction, Vermont. He is the illustrator of two popular natural science books Reading the Forested Landscape, and The Granite Landscape, and is a frequent contributor of artwork to literary reviews and other publications, including the Paris Review. A book of his work, Brian D. Cohen: Etchings & Books, was published in 2001. He was graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude with high honors from Haverford College and completed his Master's degree in Painting at the University of Washington. Brian is an avid collector of books and prints, rides motorcycles, and plays classical viola. 
 

Beethoven Walks at the Nasher

Monday, February 6, 2023

Seth Knopp's Beethoven Walks at the Nasher, commissioned by the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, TX, opened on February 5, 2023 and will remain open until May 21, 2023.

Ludwig van Beethoven left behind a vast visual record of his compositional process, a staggering reflection of the humanity that defines his music. Beethoven Walks at the Nasher Center incorporates sketches and the autograph manuscript with a recorded performance of one of the composer’s most profound and personal musical utterances, his “Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart (Holy Song of Thanksgiving to the Deity from a convalescent, in the Lydian mode), the third movement of his String Quartet, Opus 132 completed in 1825.

View the visitor guide and listen to the recording

Recording:
Takács Quartet
Edward Dusinberre and Károly Schranz, violins; Roger Tapping, viola; András Fejér, cello
Used with permission from Decca

Beethoven Walks at the Nasher is dedicated to the memory of Roger Tapping, one of the great chamber musicians of our time and a beloved Yellow Barn faculty member for nearly 20 summers. The opening event took place on February 5th, Roger's birthday.

About Beethoven Walks

Beethoven Walks is a project begun in the early spring of 2020 during our collective isolation, serving a universal need to better understand our humanity through music and the beauty of our world. The first installations, produced by Yellow Barn in Putney, Vermont, spanned four miles of woodland trails and included nine works by Beethoven accompanied by over 180 pages of sketches and autograph manuscripts. Beethoven Walks at the Greenwood School in Putney remains open to the public. 

Find out more about Beethoven Walks

Beethoven Walks was imagined and created by Seth Knopp and produced by Catherine Stephan.

Acknowledgments for Beethoven Walks at the Nasher

Banners

Howard Printing
John Kramer Design

Op.132 Autograph sketches and manuscript

Staatsbibliotek zu Berlin

Op.132 Recording

Decca Music Group, Ltd. (2004)

Installation

Nasher Sculpture Center

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