This year's Yellow Barn Music Festival features the play The Other Mozart, about the life and lost music of Maria Anna 'Nannerl' Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus's sister. It was to have featured in the Festival's 2020 lineup, but was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The play's creator and performer, Sylvia Milo, and her husband, composer Nathan Davis, who co-wrote the music, spoke with Vermont Public Classical's Helen Lyons ahead of the performances on June 27 and 28th.
TRANSCRIPT
SYLVIA MILO: I feel her as a spirit, such a beautiful soul. I just marvel in the beauty and, and of course there's sorrow and there's joy and there's all of life, you know, the beauty of our life, which is so complicated. My name is Sylvia Milo. I wrote the play. I produced it, and I gathered a team around it, and I am the performer.
HELEN LYONS: The play is The Other Mozart, and it tells the story of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's elder sister Maria Anna, or Nannerl as she was called. By all accounts, Nannerl was every bit as talented as her younger brother, but her musical career was curtailed by the societal constraints and expectations placed on women at the time. This one-woman play is coming to the Yellow Barn Music Festival on June 27th and 28th, the last time it will be performed in the US before its residency at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August. I spoke with Sylvia Milo and her husband, composer Nathan Davis, who co-wrote the music for the piece. Sylvia, what led you to the creation of the play? How did you first discover Mozart's sister Nannerl?
SYLVIA: I traveled to Vienna for big celebrations of Wolfgang's 250th birthday. In the Mozart House Museum, there was a tiny little picture. In it there was Wolfgang seated at a keyboard. Next to him there was a woman. They were playing music together. And under this little picture it said the portrait of the Mozart family. I went on to research - was there a sister? Who is this woman next to him? I was really astounded that nobody was telling the story that these were two child prodigies and that we don't know that there were two Mozarts, and then we lost one.
HELEN: Paint our listeners a picture of this visually stunning production. It's just you on stage throughout with this huge dress covered in letters and sheets of music.
SYLVIA: The set of the show is the dress, and it's about 16 ft in diameter just laying flat on the floor. We have a corset pannier kind of structure. It's like a sculpture. It's a playful thing when we start the show because she's a little girl and then when she becomes, officially a woman, she gets inside the dress and it becomes - she she basically puts herself inside a cage. But yes throughout the dress there are the Mozart family letters. On the early tours when the children were traveling, touring as child prodigies performing at the biggest courts of Europe, you know, the, the parents, wrote down their experiences to their friends back at home in Salzburg. The piece is so sensual, you know, the dress is so beautiful and there is a dusting powder, floating in the air sometimes, and the music that Nathan and Phyllis wrote is just stunning.
HELEN: Well, let's hear about the music now from Nathan Davis, who is the sound designer and co-composer with Phyllis Chen of the original music for the other Mozart. Nathan, describe the soundscape that you and Phyllis have created for the play.
NATHAN DAVIS: This request, this prompt to write music for a Mozart and a Mozart whose voice has been lost, was a pretty daunting task. How could we presume to write something that would stand in for a composer whose own music has been lost and forgotten? Phyllis and I decided first off that we would not write anything that could be mistaken for something that Nannerl actually composed. So we decided to steer well clear of classical style and rather to try to depict a musical imagination. We chose to use instruments and objects that none would have known intimately. So, of course, clavichord and harpsichord, we also used teacups. There's a scene early on where Nannerl plays a piece on teacups. And we also use hand fans quite a bit, because that's part of the accoutrement of the era. Music boxes feature prominently. Phyllis Chen is a specialist for, with music box and with a toy piano and is very well known for her work with those, and, and she wrote what we call the Nannerl theme, which Sylvia plays on a music box during the performance. We call it the Nannerl theme, but it doesn't sound like any music that was written in the 18th century.
HELEN: Do you think there might be a piece of music out there by Nannerl that may turn up in somebody's attic in Salzburg someday?
SYLVIA: I hope so. We know she composed. We have a letter from Wolfgang praising the composition she sent to him, saying it's beautiful and, and you should compose more often. If you imagine all the beauty that Wolfgang has created and has lasted for centuries, if there was even a fraction of that, you know, from Nannerl, oh, you know, how much beauty we lost just by, you know, prejudices. There are collectors that have, you know, sheets of music attributed to Wolfgang. It's a fact that some of them don't want to give it to scholars now to be analyzed again, just in case it is Nannerl’s because they don't want the value of the work to become lower.
HELEN: Oh wow, that, that's a shame. Nathan, do you have any final thoughts about what you hope your audiences will take away from seeing The Other Mozart?
NATHAN: I would like to pique the curiosity of audience members about what other music they may have been missing composers who have not been recognized from the past and for various reasons due to gender, race, and so on, and to look around them and see what composers living today, are, are creating and who decides what's on your playlist and we can discover some incredible music that doesn't conform with the the white male stereotype that we've lived with for classical music for generations and generations and see if you can look beyond that and and, and find some other interesting music. There's a lot of great stuff to discover.
HELEN: And you, Sylvia, as the performer, what do you think Nannerl might feel if she were in the audience?
SYLVIA: Back when I was a girl and studying music, it would have been so powerful for me to hear her story. Even though in her life she was stopped and she was not able to fully express her art, I, I think, I hope, that she would feel like we are using her story for good and for inspiring, especially little girls, I hope that she would approve of the overall message of it.
HELEN LYONS: My many thanks to Sylvia Milo and Nathan Davis for taking the time to speak with me. Their play, The Other Mozart, also inspired the PBS documentary, “Mozart’s Sister” which Passport members can watch on the PBS app or at vermontpublic.org. For tickets to the performances on June 27 and 28 in Putney, and more information about the Yellow Barn Music Festival, head to yellowbarn.org.
