“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.
