Not to be confused with the 2010 German film known by the same name in the Anglosphere, Mozart’s Sister (2023) is actually part of the PBS documentary series Secrets of the Dead, where forensic techniques are used to interrogate assumptions about how people lived hundreds of years ago. As a fan of forensic science shows in general, I was already pretty familiar with this series and went into it suspecting that it was going to be a very topical analysis of Maria Anna Mozart’s early life as the first Mozart prodigy, and I was pretty much right.
The topic of Maria Anna’s career as a touring child prodigy has long been a footnote in the stratospheric career of her younger brother’s life, but in recent decades academia has started poring over what little is left of Maria Anna’s compositions. Mozart’s Sister has the distracting tendency to skirt the edge of being conspiratorial (“Did she actually write Mozart’s juvenilia?”) and bordering on Oxfordian in its exploration of the possibility. Ultimately, and unsatisfyingly, there’s really no way to know exactly how much of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s childhood compositions could have been written, or at least written in collaboration with, his sister because we just don’t have that much to work with.
As far as the costumes go, unfortunately, they’re not satisfying either. Which I wasn’t really expecting from a Secrets of the Dead doc, but I had hoped for a little higher quality than what we got.
All in all, watch the show if you’ve got an hour to kill and want something playing in the background. There’s really no great revelations about Maria Anna’s life or her compositions, and the costumes are meh at best.
Have you seen Mozart’s Sister (2024)? Tell us about it in the comments!
Find this frock flick at:
Well, it seems as though they looked at the available visual evidence and did their best to replicate it, to the best of their ability and within the constraints of their budget. I think we should give them some credit for good intentions, even though their skill-level let them down
Oh I love this show! But this episode looks a tad disappointing. A zipper? Really? I may give it a go if it’s on, but probably won’t seek it out. Thanks for the review. PS: I think they did a good job casting the teenage Amadeus, he looks like his portraits!
I just watched this episode because of the email from FrockFlicks. That peachy dress that child Maria Anna was wearing – made me think that it was an off the rack bridesmaid’s dress. I question the closeups of female hands on a keyboard with rolled up sleeves, Ã la – roll up your preppy button down, instead of a proper 18th century sleeve with cuff and engagantes. Maybe they did the best they could with certain constraints including budget. I don’t know – this series isn’t what it used to be. I don’t know enough about music to question the talking heads, but I also watched an episode covering the carbonized papyrus scrolls found at the Villa di Papyri in Herculaneum, and since ancient Rome was my uni specialty, and I worked at the Getty Villa for nine years, I found myself wanting to yell at the screen because the way the program was scripted and edited skewed a lot of knowledge that was already disseminated in academia, and completely misrepresented one fact in particular. There used to be academics that I trusted on early episodes of this series, so I don’t know what happened, or if they’re budgeting and editing for a History Channel type audience, but not good. Which is pretty much my assessment of the costumes in this Mozart episode. I kind of curse the day that documentary makers decided that they have to have re-enactments on the screen instead of period paintings or engravings. There’s clearly not the budget to do it right, so why bother? Are audiences so brainless that they can’t use their imaginations and internally see what’s being described by the scholars on the screen? Why is PBS dumbing things down? Sorry – rant over.
I thought they might be going for this hairstyle : https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Maria_Anna_Mozart_(inconnu).jpg