
The lost genius of Mozart's sister - tetraodonpuffer
http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/sep/08/lost-genius-the-other-mozart-sister-nannerl
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Jun8
While the society at at that time was mainly responsible for the stifling of
women prodigies I think a large part of the blame in this particular case
should go to Leopold Mozart.

"There is evidence that Marianne wrote musical compositions, as there are
letters from Wolfgang praising her work, but the voluminous correspondence of
her father never mentions any of her compositions, and none have survived"
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Anna_Mozart](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Anna_Mozart))

Now, contrast her case with another contemporary female prodigy, Maria Gaetana
Agnesi
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Gaetana_Agnesi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Gaetana_Agnesi))
one can see that not all parents at that time were so ignorant of their
daughters' potential.

"When she was fifteen, her father began to regularly gather in his house a
circle of the most learned men in Bologna,[9] before whom she read and
maintained a series of theses on the most abstruse philosophical questions.
Records of these meetings are given in Charles de Brosses' Lettres sur
l'Italie and in the Propositiones Philosophicae, which her father had
published in 1738 as an account of her final performance, where she defended
190 theses."

Leopold Mozart was no ignoramus (say, like, Gauss' father who tried to stop
his son's education so to avoid him being an "egghead"), he could have
supported Maria Anne similarly.

~~~
78666cdc
That there are no surviving letters from Leopold now, hundreds of years later,
when there was no reason to save any letters as there might be for a famous
composer, does not indicate that there were no letters.

Aside from that, it seems highly unlikely that there would be no letters just
based on the fact that there is no known family drama or estrangement.

I think you've made quite an assumption in your reasoning.

~~~
mkesper
Nannerl preserved the letters.

------
danharaj
I could not help but gravitate towards the comment on that article where
nervous chauvinists wring their fingers over the fact that perhaps, perhaps,
people are giving a woman too much credit for what could have been her
accomplishments in a time when married women in Austria could not even own
property separate from their husbands. How can such men be presumed to
converse in good faith when they refuse to budge an inch on the idea that
women _in the 18th century_ were given a terrible deal?

I wonder, when do they peg the date that men and women became treated equally
and henceforth all difference in autonomy, liberty, and respect were due to
the inherent superiority of men? It seems they still circle about pounding
their hands on the good books lamenting the lost wisdom of the iron age.

~~~
Goladus
> I could not help but gravitate towards the comment on that article where
> nervous chauvinists wring their fingers over the fact that perhaps

I can't help but wonder whether your enthusiastic posturing about these
nameless villains is remotely accurate.

~~~
danharaj
"Feminism as a religion, Mozart had a sister therfore she had to be brighter.
It's in the air, everybody will love that, and who cares about this woman
having had no talent..."

~~~
AnthonyMouse
Your quote doesn't live up to your straw man. The quote is essentially
pointing out a specific bias and making the point that fabricating a
counterfactual will take the bias of the fabricator because you can make
things turn out however you like when you're rewriting history. Her talent is
speculation based on kind words by family members. Claiming that she had "no
talent" presumably goes too far the other way, but the point being made has
merit even if the delivery is overly exaggerated.

Notably absent is any claim that women in the 18th century were treated other
than terribly. It is possible and indeed highly likely both that women were
treated unfairly and also that Wolfgang's sister would not have rivaled him as
a composer, as there are only a small handful of people living or dead who
ever have.

~~~
danharaj
I think you refuse to see how polemical that quote is.

If it weren't such a contentious topic, people would not be comparing it to
the dogma of religion. Finding an article unconvincing warrants a shrug or
some skepticism, not invective against some bogeyman of a feminist cult. It's
not disagreeing, it's how the disagreement is expressed.

But please, go ahead and vehemently defend people who immediately resort to
contempt when the idea that a woman was overlooked by history appears.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> It's not disagreeing, it's how the disagreement is expressed.

Putting aside that that was not your original complaint, why are you then
engaging in the behavior you're objecting to? It doesn't help anything to
become the zealot your antagonists are expecting.

The conundrum of modern feminism is that 20th century feminists got nearly
everything they wanted. What remains is the hard, subtle, detail-oriented work
that doesn't lend itself to sound bites or sloganeering.

But there are people with no patients for that kind of work who would rather
stall progress by fighting against men rather than for equality. And those
people provoke the reactions you're objecting to by conditioning men to expect
to be accused of things they haven't done and blamed for things that happened
before they were born.

