# Mozart's Sister



## Guest

A 2010 French film starring Marie Féret as Maria Anna Walburga Ignacia Mozart, the older sister of Wolfgang Amadeus. Marie Féret is the daughter of the film's director, René Féret. As children, the Mozart siblings toured with their father, Leopold, displaying their formidable musical skills for the nobility. Each child plays multiple instruments with excellent proficiency. Maria is nicknamed Nannerl and she is perhaps as talented as her brother. The film revolves around the idea that females are neglected as far as talents are concerned. The only talent she is to excel in is to produce children--male children preferably.

In the movie, the itinerant family seeks lodgings one night in an abbey of a female order. There, Nannerl meets Princess Louise of France and her two sisters. Nannerl and Louise become fast friends. Through Louise, Nannerl eventually encounters her brother, Louis the Dauphin, son of Louis XV. Louis the Younger is entranced by Nannerl's music and they begin a romance which is abruptly broken when Louis marries a princess from Saxony but he invites Nannerl to his palace (with Nannerl dressed as a boy) and she hears an orchestra perform her music.

Nannerl, however, is pushed more and more into the shadow of her younger brother until she fears her musical career is going to be taken away. Indeed, as she becomes of marriageable age, Leopold forbids her to play the violin although she still accompanies her brother on the harpsichord. She tells her father that she wishes him to teach her counterpoint and harmony along with her brother. He refuses. She reveals that Wolfgang's first piece of written music, which Mozart wrote down at age 5, was hers. She was helping him with his notation by writing down notes she had heard in her head. When Wolfgang shows his father the sheet music, Leopold assumed it to be his son's work. Leopold is far from moved when Nannerl tells him this. She mentions having composed a number of sonatas which he apparently ignored but he tells that he did examine them but pronounces them, cruelly, to be "an absurd jumble of notes."

None of this is known to be true but the movie takes these liberties because something like it may have occurred. Nothing Nannerl wrote survives today but we know she wrote music because she sent the manuscripts to Wolfgang who raved over them. We know that Wolfgang and Nannerl were close but Wolfgang could not get Nannerl to rebel against her father. when Leopold took his son on tours, he was now leaving Nannerl behind to stay with her mother and learn the proper domestic duties of a wife. Wolfgang himself did eventually rebel against Leopold but Nannerl appeared incapable of doing so. She submitted to her father virtually without complaint. Whether she ever showed Leopold her manuscripts or even told them of them, we don't know. Leopold never mentioned them in any of his correspondence. 

When Nannerl eventually married, she named her firstborn Leopold. The elder Leopold then demanded that she hand custody of the child to him. Nannerl complied and rarely saw her son before Leopold's death in 1787. Leopold's reason was because he hoped to coax out another musical genius to carry on the Mozart legacy but he failed. Young Leopold turned out to be disappointingly mediocre. Wolfgang died only four years after his father and Nannerl never revived her musical aspirations.

In the movie. she meets with Louise who is now a full-fledged sister, who tells her that if they had been born as men, life and its rewards would have been very different. Nannerl died in 1829, broke and undistinguished. One can only wonder if she ever regretted submitting to her father's will. 

The movie was well-received but did not make back anywhere near what it cost to make it. Unfortunate because the sets and scenery are fantastic. 18th century pre-Revolution France among the nobility really comes to life. The movie is entirely in French but that lends an air of realism.

It has probably done better in post-release on DVD and Netflix that it did in its run. Still, it is a must-see for classical music buffs. Even if you don't like it, you have to be able to say you saw it so people don't look at you like you're an idiot when they ask you if you saw it and you have to say no. You're obliged to see it if you are a classical music buff. Even if you don't like Mozart (by then I'll be looking at you like you're an idiot).


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## SalieriIsInnocent

I didn't really care for it, and I would've been the easiest person in the world to please by watching a film about Mozart's family. Perhaps it was a tad slow for me, and never really went anywhere. It was wonderfully shot, but almost lifeless. It felt like one of those history documentaries without the narration. Maybe time will shine a brighter light on the film, but for now..


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## Biwa

Excellent review, Victor. 
It's been a few years since I've seen it. It wasn't what I had expected, but I also liked the movie a lot. The sets and scenery are indeed fantastic. The slow pace is one thing I found attractive about it. Perhaps suggesting Nannerl's resignation to her situation in life. Intriguing story.


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## Guest

I also found the movie slow but also decided since it was about a female from that period how could it be particularly exciting since they had few avenues open to them? But the story was less about the plot than the plight of being a talented female whose talent is ignored as soon as she's old enough to start squirting out babies, as though nothing else really matters, any real talent a mere distraction until she becomes marriageable. 

It is rather telling that in the US, non-white men were given the vote (at least on paper) FIFTY years before the first white woman was allowed to vote and it wasn't whites first when it came to women--all women were given the vote in the US in 1920 not just white women. So white privilege did not extend to them. They may as well have been people of color--they had about the same opportunities.

In Great Britain up to the mid-19th century, a man could legally gag his wife with a device called a scold's bridle--it fitted around her head, was locked into place, had a metal bit that was inserted into her mouth pressing down on her tongue so that she could not talk and she wore it as long as her husband wanted her to. it was ostensibly to silence the nagging wife but the real purpose was to silence women. Men talk, women listen (and obey). The fact that this device was called a bridle is telling as though the woman was a horse, another work animal and breeding animal, to be managed by the male.

In the US, a man could have his wife committed to an asylum on his say-so--no questions asked. All he had to say was, "Lock her up," and they locked her up. The woman that got this law eventually overturned spent years in an asylum despite being perfectly sane. Her crime had been to disagree with her clergyman husband on a theological point. She also became an advocate of patients' rights having seen first hand how abominably we treat our mental defectives (and still do).

When we see the dearth of female composers, we either conclude that females have no talent or there was a serious lack of access to that world for females. What's the difference if you're denied a spot in an orchestra because you're black or because you're a woman? To me, the ugliest place in the world are those places where women aren't allowed--just go into any men's bathroom. We tend to attack the misogynistic tendencies of places like the Muslim countries and India but it wasn't so long ago that we weren't so different. And we still have a long way to go.


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