Is Nannerl Mozart a simple case of Viennese whispers?

I’ve had a generally excellent week, full of interesting and stimulating chats with the likes of Geoffrey Rush, Audra McDonald, Kristian Bezhuidenhout and the extraordinary Menahem Pressler – a 92-year-old legend who knew Alma Mahler and Thomas Mann and whose unorthodox tempo for the final movement of the Ravel Piano Trio was approved by Ravel himself. It’s not often you get to hear anecdotes about what Fauré said to one of your colleagues! I got to chat to Lieven Bertels about the 40th Sydney Festival, and although my lips are sealed for a few weeks, I think it’s fair to say that there are some real gems coming our way in January. I even got to sit in on a recording session for Nicole Car’s debut recital on ABC Classics, which I’d say was sounding pretty remarkable.

It’s good sometimes to share some of the joys of a job that I consider damn near ideal as it saves these editorials from becoming simply an opportunity for me let my inner ‘Angry of Mayfair’ out. This weeks big classical music story (well, it lit up the internet and twittersphere at least) was the intriguing claim that Mozart’s savvy older sister ‘Nannerl’ had likely written some music in a notebook that the young Wolfgang might have used to learn piano. If that sounds like a lot of ‘ifs’, it certainly is. And no surprise perhaps that the claim came from Professor Martin Jarvis of the NT’s Charles Darwin University – he of the Mrs. Bach and the Cello Suites hoo-ha. 

Of course, there are plenty who like the idea that a forgotten woman might be receiving her due at long last, and good on her if she is. But then what about all those ‘ifs’? Setting aside the obvious point that writing “To be or not to be” in my notebook doesn’t mean that experts should consider me a rival candidate for the complete works of Shakespeare, even Jarvis doesn’t say that Maria Anna Mozart actually wrote any of her brother’s works. And yet if you google the story now, there are plenty who lead their reporting with just such a hypothesis. A case of Viennese whispers? I’m awaiting Professor Jarvis’s next ‘discovery’ with baited breath.