Listen to a translation of notes written by Nannerl [Mozart’s sister] for a biography of her brother Wolfgang, read by actor Carolyn Bost.
Mozart’s sister, Maria Anna (Nannerl), wrote his first biography, which was the basis for the earliest published biography of Mozart, written by Friedrich Schlichtegroll and released in 1793. Maria Anna was the first to research her brother’s life, studying letters and other personal and family documents. After the death of her father, Leopold, in 1787, she preserved these papers and later handed them to her sister-in-law Constanze. Maria Anna’s biography is particularly valuable for its personal memories of her brother’s childhood. She reports, for example, that Wolfgang composed a song that he sang with their father every day before going to bed, for which Wolfgang made up some pseudo-Italian text: “oragna figata fa marina gamina fa” (K. 637).
In the course of writing this history of her brother, she briefly discusses, in the third person, her own life and activities, taking pride in her children and her piano students. She also describes her parents, and her brother’s character.
Nannerl Mozart (1751–1829)
Biographical notes about Mozart for Friedrich Schlichtegroll
Autograph manuscript
St. Gilgen, 1792
International Mozarteum Foundation, DocBD 1212, L2026.98.48
The daughter Maria Anna Mozart has for some years now been married to a High
Princely Adviser and Provincial Administrator who has brought her children from two
previous marriages and with whom she has since had some more. She thus now lives in the
same place where her blessed departed mother was born, in modest and quiet
tranquillity entirely devoted to the beautiful duties of the wife and mother.
In the last years of her unmarried state, which she spent at home with her father, she
gave some young women of the capital city Salzburg keyboard lessons; and even nowadays
one can recognise the pupils of [Nannerl] Mozart above all by their clean performance,
precision, and correct hand position in performance.
The two Mozart parents, [Leopold and Anna Maria], were in their day the most handsome married couple in Salzburg; the daughter, too, was considered a regular beauty in her younger years. But the son Wolfgang was small, lean, of pale complexion, and completely without any pretensions regarding physiognomy and figure. Outside music, he was and remained almost always a child; and this is one of his main character traits on the shadowy side; he would always have needed a father, a mother or some other overseer.