Here comes Mozart: Her Story…. Next up, Mahler?
NewsComing to the West End next month:
Mozart: Her Story – The New Musical shines a unique light on a classic story told through the eyes of Nan, Wolfgang’s rebellious sister, who attempts to break through the misogynistic confines of the era with her courage and prodigious genius.
Mozart: Her Story – The New Musical breaks new ground as it marries Mozart’s classics with over twenty contemporary originals by Tegan Summer & Gregory Nabours.
A trend in the making? I’ve always wondered what Mahler’s sisters really thought of him. Not to mention Mendelssohn’s.
We always have our own opinions about our male siblings, and they are not very complimentary because they always prefer to follow social norms, to safeguard their career. And so, OUR talents are always overlooked while in most cases we can do better than them!
Sally
Marianne was Mozart’s talented elder sister – that’s all. I believe that little is known about her, other than that she might have composed (though I believe that none of her works is extant) and that she married and had three children. So as for the claim that this new musical …’marries Mozart’s classics…’, I take it that these will be her brother’s classics rather than hers.
Any attempt to portray her supposed ‘rebellious attempts to break through the misogynistic confines of the era with her courage and prodigious genius’ is fictitious hogwash, serving as a bogus wokist attempt to make her a victim of oppression and heroine of women’s liberation. So too would be any attempt to show that, but for her, her brother would not have been the genius that he was.
Sadly, the master of monetised theatrical sensationalism, Ken Russell, died long ago; I doubt that this venture will realise a meagre fraction of his £850,000 worth.
If anyone is looking for real examples of women who might be seen as such, and whose lives were infinitely more interesting than Nannerl’s, how about Augusta Holmès or Ethel Smyth? Then there is the life of Clara Schumann, including her relationship with her tyrannical father, her marriage to Robert and, after his premature death her enigmatic relationship with Brahms – to say nothing of her compositions.
Needless to say, I shan’t be booking for this show and neither would I be queuing for tickets for a play about Minna Wagner, Beethoven’s landladies, Chopin’s window cleaner, Mahler’s shoemaker or Elgar’s greengrocer.
Finally, although the direct line of Mozart’s descendants ended with his two childless sons, I would be fascinated to know whether there are any collateral descendants alive today. Did Leopold have any brothers, and, if so, could there be a Hans Mozart who runs a restaurant in Finchley?
Apart from Christian Max Mozart who works on the land of a farm in Thuringia, Eastern Germany, unmarried and badly dressed, and who is an active member of the local AfD party, there is no single descendant to be found (source: Stürmische Beobachter issue April 2018).
Chopin’s window cleaner always had great problems on the days he was supposed to clean the large window of Chopin’s room where he taught the piano to the upper class daughters, because he had to stand in the roof-gutter to wash the outside, and was not allowed to wash from the inside. But the window could be opened in such a way that the poor man could clean it from the gutter. Alas on 3 Obtober 1834, during a strong wind, he fell into the street and had to be carried to the hospital, and refused to ever make Chopin’s window view as pure as he had wished. This resulted in Chopin’s moving to the Chaussée-d’Antin for a couple of months where the window was on the ground floor. (Source: George Sand’s Memoirs.)
There is so much more to tell about the people surrunding great composers, but for some reason they never wrote music and if they did, like Heinrich von Herzogenberg who was a friend of Brahms, it was not that interesting.
Don’t know why but I am fond of you