Contained within an opulent dress that covers the entire stage and balancing a towering hairstyle, Milo recreates Nannerl's isolation world, in which her genius was devalued because of her gender. "Most female composers from the past have been forgotten, their music lost or gathering dust in libraries," Milo says. "We will never know what could have been, and this is our loss."
COMMENT
Again, the dusty library. Sylvia Milo (playwright, actor and producer of a one-woman show about the older sister of Wolfgang Amadeus), cites metaphorical library dust to say that music by women composers is not being performed, but the dust also offers a bit of hope. The article says, "we know she continued to create music, though none of it survives." Imagine the excitement if someone actually were to discover Nannerl's music in some dusty library.
Lost manuscripts by W.A. Mozart still turn up occasionally. In 2014, a lost manuscript of Mozart's Sonata in A Major turned up at the National Szechenyi Library in Budapest, Hungary. In 2008 librarians in Nantes, France found a Mozart manuscript while they were cataloging the archives. There really are some treasures hidden away gathering dust!
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