THE OTHER MOZART
Omnibus Theatre
★★★★
“Hilarious, moving and heartbreaking”
Despite being interested in classical music, I went into this performance knowing almost nothing about Wolfgang Mozart’s sister, Maria Anna ‘Nanneri’ Mozart—the titular ‘other’ Mozart-—a historical elision that creator, writer and performer Sylvia Milo’s striking and innovative work seeks to address.
In the form of a dramatic monologue, The Other Mozart narrates the life of Nanneri, from her early years as child prodigy born to a musical family in Saltzberg, then performing alongside her brother across Europe, through her teenage years as she is gradually sidelined and eventually left at home while her brother travels the continent, and finally as she is married to a baron living in an isolated castle. She ends her life orphaned and without her brother, returning to Salzberg to give music lessons.
This arc is performed wonderfully by Milo, who is totally engaging as the frustrated but still proud ‘talented’ sister to the ‘genius’ brother. Funny as a child, playing both the joy and annoyance of the older sister of a precocious younger brother, she becomes deeply moving in the pain of thwarted ambition. Throughout, she moves beautifully, aided by director Isaac Byrne and period movement director Janice Orlandi, a hilarious highlight being her mimed promenade with tall hair and a walking stick as she returns from fashionable Vienna to become the talk of the town in the relative backwater of Salzberg.
The staging reflects the originality of piece. An eighteen-foot dress with a spidery bodice sits erect at the centre of the space, its skirt scattered with musical scores, reviews of the siblings’ performances, and letters from Nanneri’s family, which she reads aloud or tosses away depending on their content – often she does both. The bodice is an ingenious piece of staging and costume design (by Magdalena Dąbrowska and Miodrag Guberinic). It sits there from Nanneri’s relatively free youth, a foreboding reminder of the constraints that bound non-noble women in eighteenth-century Europe, both sartorially and societally: despite her prodigious talent there is no suggestion that Nanneri will be able to follow her brother into a career in performance and the bodice constantly underscores that reality. When, following her marriage, she finally puts it on, it is a devastating moment. Nanneri’s taking up the restrictive dress of marriage is accompanied by a horrifying mechanical creaking and wrenching — a standout example of the excellent sound design by Nathan Davis—reflecting the rigidity and inescapability of roles available to women at the time.
The lighting (Joshua Rose) is stellar, picking out Milo in colour, casting her shadow onto the rear wall and fading her into darkness as her world shrinks. The use of powdered makeup and fragrance to catch the light is an especially effective technique that complements Courtney Bednarowski’s ostentatious hair design.
Musically, the piece also underlines the imbalance, the work of her brother, father, and contemporary noblewoman composer Marianna Martines are played loudly, while music standing in for Nanneri’s compositions (by Nathan Davis and Phyllis Chen) is played on bells, a music box or a tea set, the smallness and domesticity of the instruments nevertheless does not diminish its beauty.
Following success at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe, The Other Mozart makes a triumphant arrival to London. Working with limited archival sources (Nanneri states that the letters she sent to her brother have not been saved), Milo has crafted a moving portrait of the overshadowed sister of one of music’s great names. Hilarious, moving and heartbreaking by turns, Milo’s piece shines a light on a frustrated St Cecilia and asks us to question which other unique, female voices have been silenced throughout history.
THE OTHER MOZART
Omnibus Theatre
Reviewed on 16th April 2026
by Rob Tomlinson
