Girls at the Piano

turned out from what they’d expected. Hadn’t theirs? Frankly, the way my life had turned out was a surprise to me. I had not planned to be in my late thirties, trying to improvise a life as a widow—and a self-employed one to boot, cobbling together bits and pieces in what has come to be known as the gig economy. That was the only sort of gig I played these days.

My reunion sent me reeling. If I’d been as good a pianist as my peers remembered, why hadn’t I become a professional? Why had I let my musicianship lapse after all those years of intensive study and practice? What had been the point of learning to play? And what would my life look like now if I’d pursued sounds instead of sentences? These are the questions that a woman of privilege may ask herself, lying in her parents’ spare bedroom on the night before her return flight to New York, because she had an education and a choice in the matter. Regret and self-doubt are the currency of decisions. Twenty years after making mine, I—like anyone who chooses one path over another—was living with the consequences.

Millions of girls have learned to play the piano over the course of its history, and only relatively recently have gifted women pianists had much say about what to do with their talent. The example of Maria Anna Mozart illustrates the ivory ceiling that many talented women pianists have run into.

In 1763, the eleven-year-old piano prodigy began a lucrative three-year grand tour of Europe with her younger brother, performing duets for stunned audiences of aristocrats from Salzburg to London. Nannerl, as Maria Anna was known, sang and played harpsichord or piano; Wolfgang Amadeus played violin as well as the keyboard instruments. Nannerl’s ambitious father Leopold had taught her piano from the age of three, as he began teaching her little brother five years later. When Nannerl was twelve, Leopold declared her to be one of the finest pianists in Europe.¹

Few female pianists made public performances in the eighteenth century. When they did, it was often because they could be admired as freaks or anomalies, as was blind keyboardist Maria Theresia Paradis when she toured Paris and London.² Other performers attracted audiences with the novelty value of being foreign or a child.

But in 1769, despite Nannerl’s undeniable gifts, Leopold Mozart decided that his daughter would no longer tour or play for a paying audience. She had reached the marriageable age of eighteen, when the virtue of a musical girl began to hold greater cultural power than her virtuosity. Leopold felt that while it was one thing for his talented child to show off in front of an audience, something was shameful about a grown woman performing in public, irrespective of his pride in her ability. In December 1769, when her father and brother boarded a carriage en route to perform in Italy, Nannerl broke down weeping. She was staying at home, where she would perform the domestic roles that her father had chosen for her, rather than the one she would have chosen herself. She locked herself in her room and did not emerge until the next day.³

In what became a common progression for virtuosic women pianists, Nannerl reinvented herself as a highly regarded teacher, following her father’s pedagogical path without travelling anywhere. Almost ten years after Mozart’s solo career took off, Nannerl was still her father’s housekeeper in Salzburg and unmarried, because he had forced her to reject the proposal of the man she loved. Oblivious—or perhaps tone-deaf—to the ways in which his decisions had constrained her personal and professional opportunities, Leopold boasted of his daughter’s musicianship in a letter to his brother. ‘She can improvise like you wouldn’t believe,’ he wrote in February 1778, referring to Nannerl’s ability to create music spontaneously as she played.⁴ By their nature, improvisations are not intended to be written down, so we have no record of Nannerl’s. At the age of thirty-two she married a much-older man, a twice-widowed magistrate who brought five children to their union. In a salutary lesson for multi-taskers, Nannerl managed to teach while raising them plus the three that the couple composed together.

In October 1777, Nannerl’s brother had travelled to the Bavarian city of Augsburg to meet Johann Stein, whose hand-crafted pianos had impressed the composer. During Mozart’s visit, Stein’s eight-year-old daughter, Nanette, performed for him. As a precocious virtuosa, she was accustomed to public performance, but not to criticism of the sort that Mozart offered her father—which he recorded in a letter to his own father:

Mr Stein is completely silly about his daughter. She is eight years old and learns everything only from memory. She might amount to something, she has genius; but…she will get nowhere, she will never get much speed, because she makes a special effort to make her hand heavy. She will never get what is the most needful and the hardest, and the principal thing in music, Tempo, because from infancy on she has made it a point not to play in time.⁵

Tempo, the speed at which a piece of music should be played, is one of the key paradoxes of musicianship: the more time the young pianist devotes to playing in tempo, which is to say at a consistent speed—even if that speed is as slow as a wet week—the faster she will be able to play, as her dexterity catches up with her impatience. In Mozart’s identification of Nanette Stein’s tendency to rush, predilection for memorising the notes and heavy wrist, he could have been writing about any number of the thousands of young girls learning to play the piano in the late eighteenth century, or in the late nineteenth, or even the late twentieth—myself included.

In 1792, when Johann Stein died, 23-year-old Nanette took over her father’s business. Who knows if she heeded any of Mozart’s advice about technique, but by then she knew more than anyone about the mechanics of building pianos. She