Maria Anna Walburga Ignatia "Marianne" Mozart (30 July 1751 – 29 October 1829), nicknamed Nannerl, was a highly regarded musician from Salzburg, Austria.

In her childhood, she made tremendous progress as a keyboard player under the tutelage of her father Leopold, to the point that she became a celebrated child prodigy, touring much of Europe with her parents and her younger brother Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Particularly for the early years, when she was most famous, there are many news reports and other observations, collected and recorded by scholars such as Otto Erich Deutsch.

[3] There were several such journeys: first to Munich, then Vienna, then a three-year grand tour of northwestern Europe, including long stays in London and Paris.

He sought to prepare Wolfgang for a Kapellmeister position, which would offer a steady and substantial income which would enable him to support the entire family as his parents aged.

"[6] Wolfgang continued to tour with Leopold (for instance, in three journeys to Italy), while Marianne had to stay at home in Salzburg with her mother.

Around the summer of 1783, Marianne seems to have developed a relationship with Franz Armand d'Ippold, who was a captain in the Imperial and Royal Army as well tutor to the Salzburg court pages.

[10] Eventually, on 23 August 1784 Marianne, aged 33, married a magistrate named Johann Baptist Franz Freiherr von Berchtold zu Sonnenburg (1736–1801),[11] and settled with him in St. Gilgen, a village in Austria about 29 km[12] east of the Mozart family home in Salzburg.

[14] The government had built a substantial residence and headquarters for the Pfleger in 1720, and this is the home (where her late mother had spent her first four years) into which Marianne moved on her marriage.

During the early years of her marriage Marianne conducted an extensive correspondence with Leopold, who until his death (on 28 May 1787) attempted to provide what help he could from a distance, running errands and reporting news.

"[22] An unusual episode in Marianne's life occurred when she gave birth (27 July 1785) to her first child, a son who was named Leopold after his grandfather.

The elder Leopold stated (by a letter that preceded Marianne back to St. Gilgen) that he would prefer to raise the child for the first few months himself.

Biographer Maynard Solomon attributes the arrangement to Leopold's wish to revive his skills in training a musical genius, as he had done with Marianne's brother.

Wolfgang's contributions, often added on to Leopold's letters, are affectionate, frequently teasing; they included some of the scatological and sexual wordplay in which he indulged with intimates.

[25] However, a widely noted fact about relationship between the two siblings is that the last letter from Wolfgang to Marianne (she kept correspondence assiduously) is dated 1788, fully three years before his death,leading some scholars, e.g. Solomon,[26] to infer that there was a falling out.

Otto Jahn likewise judged that the two siblings may have severed their relationship, and suggested various reasons:[27] that Wolfgang had essentially abandoned his family when he moved off to Vienna, that she did not care for his wife Constanze, and perhaps some friction over the disposal of Leopold's estate.

Mary Novello, visiting in 1829, recorded her impression that Marianne was "blind, languid, exhausted, feeble and nearly speechless", as well as lonely.

[3] Eva Rieger writes in the New Grove: [Marianne] obviously adopted the prescriptive and pedagogical literature of the late Enlightenment and lived as the epitome of contemporary ideas of femininity (piety, self-sacrifice, propriety, modesty).

Some possible examples of "self-sacrifice" are mentioned above: the abandonment of her career as a performing musician, the giving up of the chance to marry the man of her choice, the marrying of a different and probably unsuitable man (that this marriage was not voluntary is suggested by Rieger), and her inability to take up Wolfgang's suggestion that she move to Vienna and pursue professional opportunities there.

[34] Halliwell narrates an episode in her religious experience: On Good Friday 1779 she and her friend Katherl Gilowsky embarked on a pious round of visits to sixteen different churches to mark the occasion.

At one church (the Kajetanerkirche), they climbed a stairway on their knees;[35] the day was concluded by a visit to Holy Trinity to hear the special music for Good Friday.

Rieger notes that she was "an avid reader and theatre-goer"; she had good friends in Salzburg (Katherl Gilowsky in particular appears in the records repeatedly), and she participated fully in a rich family life.

(In it, Wolfgang and Marianne are playing four-hands, Leopold holds his violin, and the deceased mother Anna Maria looks down from her portrait.)

Readers are cautioned to enjoy such works without trying to extract facts from them; Hilscher's words "the wish is father to the thought" are widely applicable in this literature.