Before Wolfgang, there was Maria Anna Mozart, known as Nannerl, the older sister whose keyboard playing in the salons of Paris left French critics scrambling for adjectives while her little brother watched transfixed. This deep dive reconstructs her life largely from letters written to her and from the choices she made, since her own diaries were mostly pragmatic expense logs.

The episode follows her from brutal childhood tours in unsuspended carriages, and a 1765 illness in The Hague so severe she received last rites, to the abrupt end of her touring at 18 when social norms deemed a grown woman instrumentalist improper. It then explores her marriage at 33 to a twice-widowed magistrate with five children, her damp practice room in St. Gilgen, and her final decades as a widow who reclaimed her independence in Salzburg.

• The Kingdom of Back, the shared imaginary world where she held equal authority with her brother
• Wolfgang writing out his own cadenzas so she could follow his creative process, and praising a song she composed, though none of her music survives
• Why the Franz d’Ippold romance may have failed because of court rules on school directors rather than Leopold’s control
• A pragmatic reading of why she left her infant son Leopold in Salzburg with her father
• How she supplied the childhood correspondence and timelines that early biographers and Constanze relied on to build Wolfgang’s origin story