The documentary Mozrt’s Sister won two AACTA Awards — for Best Original Score and Best Sound in a Documentary February 2025.
When his eldest child turned seven, Leopold Mozart decided it was time to start music lessons. The instruction began with scales and simple Austrian folk tunes in his modest yellow apartment with white-trimmed windows in Salzburg, where Leopold worked as the second violinist at court. It was 1758 and the Mozart family had endured years of grief and difficulty. Five of Leopold and his wife Anna Maria’s seven children had died, and so the couple devoted themselves to their surviving children’s education, protection and advancement.
“I think that he really loved his children and that he really cared about them. He also was extremely practical about how to manage things,” says filmmaker Madeleine Hetherton-Miau.
Anna Maria instructed her son, Wolfgang, and daughter, Maria Anna, in several languages and cultivated an interest in science. Leopold gave them harpsichord lessons and taught them composition. Music was cherished in their little yellow home. Leopold’s parents had expected him to join the family bookbinding business and when he announced that he wanted to be a musician, they cut him off.
“He walked away from his family who disowned him and broke off relations,” says Madeleine. She continued: “He spent years becoming skilled and becoming a good musician. He was ambitious.”
“He had a vision,” she says.
Leopold quickly discovered, to his delight, that his eldest child was a gifted musician. Writing in 1764, he said his child played “the most difficult works which we have … with incredible precision and so excellently. What it all amounts to is this,” he continued. “My little girl … is one of the most skilful players in Europe.”
Who was Mozart’s sister?
Before Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart captivated the world with his symphonies, Maria Anna Mozart was an acknowledged musical genius in her own right. As a child, she played for Emperors and Empresses. She befriended a young Marie-Antoinette when she performed at the palace in Vienna and was praised for her gift. Yet her name and talent have been forgotten. At the age of 15, she was forced to stop playing because it was indecent for a woman to perform publicly.
“I never knew Mozart had a sister,” says Madeleine. “I’d never heard about this other child prodigy who had had this incredible career as a child, was considered one of the best piano keyboard players of her time, and then had just disappeared into the mist of history.”
The idea of a second, hidden Mozart intrigued Madeleine.
“What if there had been an equally talented sibling? What would their music have been like? You have to wonder, if she had been born a boy, what would we enjoy today?”
Madeleine’s discovery of Maria Anna Mozart’s talent came as the roles of women throughout history are being reexamined. “We know that a lot of women in history have not been well documented because of the social conventions,” she says. “Misogyny at the time meant that women’s stories were not interesting, and they were overlooked.”
Some historians are now working to re-balance history to acknowledge women’s contributions. Madeleine made a documentary, Mozart’s Sister, to uncover the truth of Maria Anna’s life.
“The sad thing is that we don’t know how much we’ve lost with all these very talented composers and musicians who were never taken seriously,” composer and former prodigy Alma Deutscher says in the film. She believes Maria Anna was not a passive presence in the music life of her little brother Wolfgang. “I’ve often thought of how much she could have helped him.”
Two talented children
Maria Anna’s lessons and playing were young Wolfgang Mozart’s first experience of music.
“When Wolfgang is four, there are records of him starting to play music,” Madeleine says.
Leopold recognised that his very young son also had an aptitude for music, so he took his two children to play in the court in Vienna which was ruled by the Habsburg dynasty.
“It was the centre of the whole Roman Empire at the time,” says Madeleine. “The Empress had lots of children, and she married them all the way up and down Italy and in Germany.” Her youngest, Marie Antoinette, became Queen of France.
“At that first performance where the children played for the family, Marie Antoinette was there, and there’s all these stories about them playing together. At that point, Maria Anna is the virtuoso piano player and Wolfgang is an interesting, bright, prodigy child.”
In payment, the children were given some clothing and money. It was the equivalent of a year’s salary.
“Leopold realised at that point that maybe they could repeat this,” Madeleine says. Leopold Mozart devised a plan. For three and a half years, the Mozart family travelled around Europe, playing wherever they could.
They travelled via coach from Salzburg to Munich, then Frankfurt, Cologne, The Netherlands, to the court at Paris on to London. Leopold understood that his children would not be considered miracles once they grew up. He had to capitalize on their gifts. The family was on the road so often that Maria Anna and Leopold devised a fantasy world called ‘The Kingdom of Back’, of which Wolfgang was King and Maria Anna was Queen. They had a close and affectionate relationship.
In 1764, the family reached London, where they would stay for 15 months. During this time Leopold became ill, and the tour paused. Stuck in a house under strict instructions to remain quiet, Wolfgang, then eight, began to compose his first symphony, which Maria-Anna orchestrated.
“I think it’s an open question about the first symphony,” Madeleine says. “I think you could really see that as a collaboration.”
Why did Mozart’s sister stop playing?
By now, Maria Anna was approaching womanhood. While Wolfgang could go on to forge a career as a composer and musician, her future was as a wife and mother. From the age of 15, she would no longer be able to tour. She had to protect her reputation and the honour of her family.
“[Leopold] takes her off the circuit and everything is focused around Wolfgang,” says Madeleine. “It seemed to me that she was desperate to keep playing music.”
Wolfgang would write Maria Anna letters but she would not reply. Her education was now in housekeeping and serving her future husband.
“I think it really broke her heart because, for a family that wrote to each other extensively, every few days, she doesn’t write to her brother for months,” Madeleine says.
“He’s writing lots of letters saying, ‘Please write’, and ‘Missing you’. He’s really begging her to write to him and she doesn’t do it. We’ll never really know what happened, but it seems as if she just didn’t have it in her because she didn’t have much to do in Salzburg.”
Very few of the letters Maria Anna wrote exist. Historians have gleaned glimpses of her life through the letters Wolfgang sent to her, which she kept. They hold evidence that she sent him pieces of music she had written.
“You have composed the bass in an incomparable way and without the slightest error. I beg you to try similar things often,” Wolfgang wrote to Maria Anna from Naples, on May 19, 1770. “I am truly amazed that you can compose so well. In a word, the piece you wrote is beautiful.”
Letters written by Leopold reveal that in the years after Maria Anna stopped touring, but before she was married, her talent became even greater.
“She’s practising day and night. She’s just practising, practising, practising. And her skill level … it’s exceptional. She’s extemporizing which is like improvising …like the best of the best, and her talent is just flowering,” Madeleine says.
Maria Anna’s furious improvement was happening against a setting of desperation. Wolfgang had gone to Vienna in search of work, and the whole family was relying on Leopold, who was growing older.
“Her situation’s very fragile. If her father dies, because he’s getting older, there’s nowhere for her to go. She must have felt very trapped at that point in her life because she couldn’t earn her own money unless she became a servant. She was entirely dependent on the men in her life,” Madeleine says.
Maria Anna eventually married a magistrate and aristocrat, Baptist Franz von Berchtold zu Sonnenburg. He was twice widowed and had five children. They lived in a damp lakeside home about a day’s walk from Salzberg and her time was spent caring for and educating her husband’s children, and later her own three children. She did, however, have a small room for her harpsichord.
“Even when she was in this really isolated place, she was continually writing to her father asking him for music that she could play. There’s a record of her playing three hours a day. I feel like she kept herself at concert-ready performance,” Madeleine says.
“She loved getting music back from her brother in Vienna when he was writing in that late period of his life. He was writing all this great music. She was re-orchestrating it so she could play it in her home with just herself and a few local musicians. She was a really clever woman.”
Ms Mozart’s encore
Wolfgang Mozart died at the age of 35 in 1791 having composed more than 600 pieces of music. Ten years later, Maria Anna’s husband also died. As a widow of an aristocrat in her 50s, Maria Anna returned to court where she could delight “the highest society in Salzburg” with her playing.
One visiting Nobleman, Friedrich Von Spaur, wrote upon hearing her play, “Among the best music talents who grace the city of Salzburg is Mozart’s sister.”
“I think she had an extraordinary life in terms of the things she saw and did,” says Madeleine. “I think she had a really difficult life in many ways as well.”
When she started her research, Madeleine thought she might be able to find some music of Maria Anna’s that had been mis-ascribed, the way other music has been over the centuries. “Because the Mozart catalogue had the most extraordinary story. It was moved around. Things have got lost or just not correctly ascribed in the first place,” she says.
Just last month, a previously unknown piece of music composed by Wolfgang Mozart was uncovered by Leipzig municipal libraries in Germany.
“I thought, perhaps there is a researcher somewhere that has really found something,” Madeleine says. “We’ve not found that.”
The rules of society were such that even if Maria Anna was writing music, it would not have been published, performed, or even saved.
“If she had the same gift, it still wouldn’t have been emphasised because there was no future in it for her,” artist Sylvia Milo says in Mozart’s Sister.
Madeleine says it’s hard to imagine what life was like for women living in the sixteenth century. “It’s unthinkable that it happened to Maria Anna,” she says. “And we really have lost out because of it.”
Mozart’s Sister is available to stream on Apple TV+.
This article originally appeared in the Christmas issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly. Pick up the latest edition from your local newsagents or subscribe so you never miss an issue.
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