5 ms·

The lost genius of Mozart's sister

danharaj 11y ago
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.
- JesperRavn 11y ago
  Are you saying that in order to not be a chauvinist, one must agree with any claim about the achievements of any woman born before 1969 (or wherever you happen to draw the line). If you are simply saying that one must take the sexism of the time into account, how can you be sure the alleged chauvinists haven't already done so before making their judgement?
- Goladus 11y ago
  > 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 11y ago
    "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 11y ago
      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 11y ago
        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 11y ago
        > 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.
- 78666cdc 11y ago
  It is interesting that a single comment (since you said "the comment") led to you write a response about "them" and what "they" think. Anonymous internet comments are a grab bag of all the most ignorant comments in the world and are not indicative of actual general social attitudes, and this has been known for a very long time. The interesting part is that your comment here is, for me at least, one of those exact comments, constructing some sort of imaginary foe to rage against.
Jun8 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    Nannerl preserved the letters.

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.

JesperRavn 11y ago
Are you saying that in order to not be a chauvinist, one must agree with any claim about the achievements of any woman born before 1969 (or wherever you happen to draw the line). If you are simply saying that one must take the sexism of the time into account, how can you be sure the alleged chauvinists haven't already done so before making their judgement?
Goladus 11y ago
> 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 11y ago
  "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 11y ago
    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 11y ago
      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 11y ago
        > 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.
78666cdc 11y ago
It is interesting that a single comment (since you said "the comment") led to you write a response about "them" and what "they" think. Anonymous internet comments are a grab bag of all the most ignorant comments in the world and are not indicative of actual general social attitudes, and this has been known for a very long time. The interesting part is that your comment here is, for me at least, one of those exact comments, constructing some sort of imaginary foe to rage against.

Jun8 11y ago

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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  Nannerl preserved the letters.