THE OTHER MOZART Comes To Edinburgh Fringe

Long before she vanished into the margins of music history, Maria Anna Mozart (known as Nannerl) dazzled Europe as a musical prodigy, performing alongside her brother Wolfgang Amadeus. But while his fame endured, hers was extinguished.

Based on meticulous research and drawn directly from the Mozart family's own letters, The Other Mozart by Sylvia Milo has toured internationally - from New York to Vienna, Salzburg to Hong Kong - and inspired a PBS documentary, Mozart's Sister, released in 2024.

The Other Mozart brings Nannerl's buried story to light. Returning to the UK for the first time in over a decade for their debut Edinburgh Festival Fringe run , the production tells the poignant true tale of a genius female musician whose life was shaped and ultimately limited by the social constraints of her time.

Staged atop a huge 5-metre 18th-century inspired dress that becomes both costume and set, conjuring a fantastical yet claustrophobic world of beauty and restriction, The Other Mozart immerses audiences in a sumptuous classical-era world. The dress, designed by Magdalena Dabrowska, spills across the stage like a living memory, while clouds of powder and the scent of perfume rise into the air. The performance becomes a multi-sensory experience, using award-winning original music created by Nathan Davis and Phyllis Chen (Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival) for clavichords, music boxes, teacups and fans to evoke Nannerl's world.

Built from the Mozart family's own letters, all of which were preserved by Nannerl herself, the play paints a portrait of a young woman of extraordinary talent. We meet her as a child prodigy, touring Europe to great acclaim alongside her brother, her name often appearing first on the bill above Amadeus. But at aged 18, societal expectations stopped her career in its tracks. Women were not meant to perform professionally in public, much less compose music, but were expected to marry and have children. Her brother praised her compositions and encouraged her to keep writing music. Her father did not. None of her compositions survived.

In an era reckoning with whose voices get preserved and whose are silenced, The Other Mozart resonates powerfully. Nannerl's story is not just a historical footnote; it's emblematic of how women's creative legacies have been systematically erased. The play speaks directly to contemporary conversations around equity in the arts, historical revisionism, and the ongoing work of reclaiming lost narratives. The Other Mozart offers a haunting, timely reminder: even if a person is incredibly talented or brilliant, they still need to be seen, heard, and supported by systems that have the power to elevate them. Historically, women like Nannerl didn't have that. And many others still don't.

Created, written and originally performed by Sylvia Milo, and now also featuring Daniela Galli in alternating performances, The Other Mozart has received international acclaim. Following a celebrated Off-Broadway run at HERE Arts Center, the show has toured to 30 U.S. states and 9 countries. The play has inspired a wave of renewed interest in Nannerl's life, including the feature-length documentary film, broadcast in the U.S. on PBS, on Austrian television, and in cinemas internationally. The documentary was directly inspired by Milo's writing in The Guardian, tracing how this long-erased figure was finally brought back into cultural consciousness.

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