Saving Mozart Tickets

The concert album dropped online three years ago, but the new songs, which use Mozart's music as the foundation, have been 260 years in the making. Now, they’re given an audience in the form of a packed The Other Palace Theatre. The theatregoers here aren’t the royalty you’ll find across the road (no offence to my fellow audience members last night. You still scrub up well), they’re people of all ages, occupations and backgrounds. The ‘common’ people that Mozart, as we learn, dreamed of reaching. The kind he composed for. The kind he lived, and died, for.

This new musical reframes the story we think we know. At its core is the tension between brilliance and expectation: Nannerl, the sister whose talent was used to train her younger brother; Leopold, the obsessive father who orchestrated Mozart’s childhood; and Constanze, the devoted wife who refused to let history silence him.

When we first meet Wolfgang (Wolfie to his friends), he has all the bravo and swagger you’d expect from an internationally renowned rockstar. And who could blame him? His Symphony No. 40 reached #2 on the UK singles chart, 180 years after his death - last year's summer anthem, Espresso, isn’t making the top 50 anymore. He addresses the audience with a self-satisfied smile and mock humility. “You’re all here for me, aren’t you?” before proceeding to lounge on a giant white ‘M’ that dominates most of the stage. A cloth drops from the edge of the letter to reveal mirrored panelling. When we look at the family's initial he is reflected back. He is all we see. He is all history sees. But we learn that wasn’t always the case.     

Original Six queen, Aimie Atkinson, reclaims another woman lost to history. Here she’s Mozart’s long-suffering sister, Nannerl. Every bit as talented as her brother, her career is prematurely cut when her father (Douglas Hansell) tells her that a woman of marrying age should not be writing and playing her own music like a ‘whore.’ He states plainly that she was only subjected to years of strict piano lessons and recitals, so that Wolfgang could watch, copy and repeat - not so that she could step into the spotlight. “Playing to my own rules” sung with grit and guts by Atkinson is a self-empowering, motivational, feminist battle cry that wouldn’t feel out of place in Six itself. Which makes it even more heartbreaking when we see her bound by corsets and society's expectations later on. Her talent was never hers to keep; it was a template for someone else’s glory.