Her Mouth Is a Bloody Closet

Her Mouth Is a Bloody Closet Sharon Chmielarz. The Other Mozart. Ontario Review Press 2001. 97 pp. $21.95 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had a sister named Maria Anna, known as Nannerl, who was also a pianist and a child prodigy. In the 1760s, she and her brother toured the courts of Europe together, playing four hands; for a time, Nannerl was thought to be the better pianist. But at the age of eighteen, no longer a child, and less likely to make money than her fourteen-year-old brother, Nannerl was retired to Salzburg, where she gave piano lessons and wrote songs that Wolfgang admired. She also wrote hundreds of letters and kept a diary, which we know because it is referred to in a letter from her brother: are the living chronicle of Salzburg, for you write down every single thing that occurs. After Wolfgang's death, she became a key figure in preserving and documenting his compositions-without her there would have been fewer works, and many decisions about his final intentions would have been much less informed. Nannerl threw herself into this work in part to escape a bleak domestic life: She had been married off at thirty-three by her mercenary father. Leopold Mozart prevented her from marrying the man she loved and instead chose a wealthy widower, whom she joined in the desolate backwater of St. Gilgen, armed with a marriage contract that guaranteed her four hours of practice a day. The gifts that women develop in circumstances such as these are often the ones hardest to reconstruct across time-these women are more likely to be brilliant conversationalists than writers, to be musicians rather than composers, to work in anonymous art forms like quilting or weaving as opposed to painting or sculpture. Time has closed over Nannerl Mozart; even the most ardent admirers of her brother's music frequently don't know that she existed. And yet her life ought to make a claim on our attention in a way that is particular to the sisters of famous men. Like Dorothy Wordsworth, or Alice James, or even the sister that Virginia Woolf invented for Shakespeare, Nannerl draws us in by virtue of what she shared with her brother and contributed to his life, but most of all by what we are sure is missing; she's compelling because so little is known about her. But unlike Dorothy Wordsworth or Alice James, whose letters and journals give us a sense of the kind of writers they might have been, there is little record of Nannerl's musical life. We know how many hours a day she practiced, and that her performances were technically dazzling, but not what kind of music she made, or how she heard it in her head-gaps that make the task of the biographer still more difficult. A conventional English biography of Nannerl has yet to be written, but Sharon Chmielarz has risen to the challenge with a book of biographical poems, The Other Mozart. Poetry's proximity to both music and letters-its attentiveness to sound and rhythm, its sense of intimate address-would seem to make it the right medium for writing the life of a woman about whom we know chiefly that she was a fine musician and a dedicated epistler. Telling the story in poems also gives Chmielarz the freedom to bring her own experience to bear, a freedom that is a strength and a danger, leading to the collections most insightful moments and to poems where Nannerl seems to disappear behind the author altogether. A German biography of Nannerl, by Eva Rieger, was published in 1990, and provided one of the major sources for Chmielarz's compact exploration. Another source, and an important formal inspiration for these poems, is one of the classics of music history, The Letters of Mozart and His Family. There were but four members of the immediate Mozart family, five children having died in infancy, and these four were exceptionally close. At least two of the Mozarts were always on tour. They kept themselves company by writing letters full of warmth, devotion, and a scatological humor that raises eyebrows even now. …

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