3 ms·
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
by 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 agoThat 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 agoNannerl preserved the letters.