Think you know the Mozart story? Think again. Secrets of the Dead returns for its 21st season with “Mozart’s Sister,” an eye-opening investigation into one of classical music’s biggest what-ifs: Did Maria Anna Mozart, Wolfgang’s supremely talented but largely forgotten older sister, have a hand in shaping his earliest works? As the Mozart siblings toured Europe as child prodigies, what role did she play in the rise of her younger brother’s genius?

To uncover the truth, documentary producer and director Madeleine Hetherton-Miau takes viewers on a deep dive into history, talent, and the challenges of being a female prodigy in the 18th century. KLCS caught up with the Australia-based filmmaker to discuss the making of this fascinating episode; from her initial inspiration for the project, the mysteries surrounding Maria Anna, to the surprising discoveries that emerged along the way, Hetherton-Miau offers fresh insights into this long-forgotten musical chapter.

Madeleine what prompted you go on this journey produce this documentary?
MHM: I came across this article that was written by Sylvia Milo, one of the participants in the film; she’s based in New York, but toured globally. She created this show around the character of Maria Therese, because she herself she had discovered that there was this other Mozart who was also a child prodigy. She got curious, “What was the story of this woman?” So I read this article and then I got very curious about what was the story about Maria Anna Mozart, because Mozart is a global name. I think there are very few people that would not recognize the name Mozart and probably would recognize the music without even knowing it’s Mozart, because his music is used through advertising and films. So whether you know it or not, Mozart is probably been on your radar at one point. So, I just got really curious about this lost female story and wanted to find out a bit more about it.

I always wondered about her; this might be the first documentary, of this kind, giving light to Maria’s story.
MHM: I think it is. Before you make a documentary, you look around to see if anything else is on the topic. And we couldn’t find anything long-form or that had been on a national or global level before. She’s very representative of lots of women in history, which is, there hasn’t been a lot of space given to them; particularly when you have a brilliant brother who is the focus of everything. I have lots of opinions about what happened in her life and so do other people. And, it’s a very interesting space because she’s a bit allusive because there’s not so much documentation about her. She was born in 1751, so pre-photography; there are some paintings of her. She’s probably got more paintings than most people. Several of her as a young child, as a young adult, and a middle aged-woman, so that speaks to the fact that she was valued, that she has her own paintings. The family kept an extensive correspondence, they write to their friends, they write to each other, but unfortunately, most of the women’s side have not been kept. It’s really the male side of the correspondence that we have today, although there’s enough letters for us to get a real sense of her personality and enough of the conversation going over decades between herself and her brother. What she wrote in her letters and so much of what she wrote in music has just been lost.

I was so excited when I saw this documentary on the PBS press portal – as a Secrets of the Dead episode. How did this documentary become a Secrets episode, had you contributed to this show before?
MHM: We’ve known Stephanie (Carter) for a number of years and just loved what she did and was interested in her history program, but we didn’t really have a story to offer her to really fit the strand, but then we were at one of these documentary markets and catching up with Stephanie and just asking how her day was. And she said, “I’ve had a lot of pitches, I just really wish someone would bring me a story about a woman, they’re always about men.” And it was just one of those moments in time, like, “Oh, I think we finally have something that we can talk to you about.” Really, that was it, I sent her the pitch deck and the reel. We’d done quite a lot of development work and I’d done a lot of research already on it, and she said, “That’s great, we can do this.” And it went pretty smoothly from there.

What was your journey to making this sort of historical documentary?
MHM: It starts with the character, there’s a bit of a mystery about her so that’s intriguing, when you think, “Well, what could we find?” And there’s a bigger picture where there’s quite a movement to restore women who’ve been lost in history, to kind of equalize the history books and to remove the bias which has excluded them. So, there’s that general environment in which this story fits, but I think the reason why I wanted to do her story as opposed to anybody else’s – I thought she seemed really interesting. She was this really imaginative, creative child. We can tell from the early stories about them, and from the letters – they had this incredibly playful and creative and musical relationship. Her father was quite a busy court musician and composer. He was busy at Salzburg Court. She was five years older, so she got the first music lessons. So it doesn’t take much to start to think about – “I guess she would have been playing and practicing music as a young child and her very young brother, because Wolfgang was five years younger, would have been growing up watching her play music and then joining her at the harpsichord and then they would play together.” And then they really became this all-star act that toured around Europe for years and years together. In the early days you see the notices publicizing their performances, and she’s [at the] top. Of course, as time goes on, she was withdrawn from public life because as a child she could perform in public and there was no problem with that. But, as a young woman it just couldn’t be done, not if you wanted to preserve your marriageability and your place in society; to be able to exist in the nobility. There wasn’t middle class at that time, so the opportunities were just incredibly narrow, and if you fell out, there wasn’t much for you except maybe a faceless governess or becoming a servant. Maria Anna had at least one friend, her close friend Katherine, that’s what happened to her, she ended up being a servant.

Did you feel there was more to say about her; had you been interested in doing more digging on her story, just in general?
MHM: Yes, we’ve actually got a feature length documentary as well as the PBS hour; there is more to the story. There’s different ways to look at her, and try and understand her story. One is through the historical records like the letters. One is through musicology; is there a way to find her musical notation in the early piece that survived? There’s an open debate happening between different people – “Would you consider the first symphony a collaboration or not?” After that, we do know she was composing because she and Wolfgang are writing to each other and sending each other music, and he’s commenting on her music and he is praising her music. The frustrating thing, of course, is that we don’t have the copies of the music anymore. They’re just lost. Things also get lost and rediscovered. So that would be pretty amazing if they would turn up.

Working in the history space, are you surprised that we are still uncovering centuries-old artifacts? That so many manuscripts did survive the ravages of wars and time.
MHM: There’s actually a story about that too. The fact that we’ve got anything is kind of a miracle, really. The story about what happened to the Mozart music catalogues, for a start. He died young and, I expect, there was a certain amount of disarray around his works at that time. There was also some of the work Leopold, his father, was holding in Salzburg. They’re sending things back and forth all the time, the family’s always asking each other to send bits of music. Most things were handwritten, only some stuff was printed because it was an expensive process to do it. There’s also an issue about copying and stealing music. The Mozarts were always worried about people stealing the music. There’s the mystery around the Requiem, which was a commission.

You mean the Requiem’s patron, who was unknown?
MHM: He was known; that was one of the big myths. He was completely known. He commissioned Wolfgang Mozart to write the Requiem for his wife, who died. Mozart was busy writing that when he died. He [the patron] was in the habit of taking things he’d commissioned from another composer, bringing it to his place of residence with his musicians, putting his own name on it, and performing it under his own name. It was fairly well-known.

The patron would take the credit?
MHM: The patron would do this. The research around this, was, until Wolfgang died, the plan was a similar thing was going to happen. And, in fact, Mozart’s wife had to publish it quickly to avoid the patron from publishing it under his own name. The background around Mozart’s manuscripts, not just Maria Anna’s work — there was a lot of confusion and movement; after Wolfgang died, there were instances of people publishing music as Mozart, which wasn’t, so they could make money by publishing it. There’s always been quite a complicated business about what is truly Mozart; it’s taken hundreds of years. There have been catalogues published, of which the most well-known is the Köchel catalogue, and even that’s had multiple revisions over time, and continues to be revised as new musicology establishes different facts.

At the end of the film, the forensic document investigator said she needed to see original documents. We learn that there are still so many more manuscripts to be examined; is there a natural follow-up to this story, eventually?
MHM: I would love to think that somebody would be able to find more manuscripts, there’s possibly more Wolfgang Mozart work out there too. Of course, we would love to find genuinely-sourced Maria Anna Mozart music. At this point In time, nobody has been able to establish that at all. But it’s a good question to ask, isn’t it? Because if you don’t ask the question, then nobody looks in the right place. And we know that if it’s not even considered, then we know that even if you would find something, it would automatically not be ascribed to the right person. So, it’s really important to keep an open line of inquiry about it. There’s a lot a lot of speculation about it as well. If you go online there’s lots and lots of speculation about Mozart, because he’s such a well-known character. And I think it’s really important to not to go too far the other way as well, which is, to make a lot of spurious clams that have absolutely no foundation. I think the investigation is worth pursuing, and Heidi is saying we have to look and we have to be thoughtful and scientific and serious about how we access things, so we don’t go down a rabbit hole and produce a result that doesn’t stand up to rigorous scrutiny.

It must have been quite fulfilling to be able to do work where you’re chronicling history and helping to uncover more history. Did that ever hit you as you worked on this project?
MHM: Yeah, it was really nice, because it was an untold story. It was nice to grow the map with a bit of our history, and work in an area that hasn’t had much sketched-in and to try and show a bit more. Because a lot of history has been told before, I found it exciting and interesting to just be working in an area where you think, ‘This is genuinely going to open some new lines of inquiry,” and, hopefully, provoke some questions about some other women in history as well; there’s just a lot there, to find.

What did you learn from this documentary and journey?
MHM: What a good question. I learned, looking at their lives, life in the 18th century was really busy as well (laughs) and the whole family – they were busy! We think that we’re busy and that outside the modern era they were not busy, but they were. They were in a hard scramble to pay for their lives. It was a very thin middle class at the time. Leopold Mozart is an interesting character; flawed, but interesting. He had immense vision, really, for his family. Also a terrible stage mum, or tennis dad. But he really had this vision for both his children; he was surprisingly open to both those children being very well educated. They spoke four or five languages, they traveled extensively. He was self-interested too, he was promoting them because it helped the family, it helped him. But they had extraordinary lives and she had an extraordinary life. It, also, really reawakened for me – I just have to go back to doing more music myself, because I’ve been surrounded by it the last couple years and you just think, “Here’s a family that lived their music every day and what a wonderful life that was.”

Are you planning on going back to doing more music?
MHM: I’ve been a filmmaker most of my life. But I do play instruments; I actually sing in a choir. It’s just been more of an incentive to do it at home; just doing more, rather than watching other people playing music. Just enjoy it, do it yourself. It’s just like everything, unless you do it, you don’t get any better (laughs) so you have to do a lot of it to get good at it. It was just a good reminder to play more. It’s only more recently that people feel like they have to be professional doing it as a job in order to play music; it never used to be like that. We got together as communities, as families, and played music together. It’s just a really beautiful thing to do. There’s some great science around how our brainwaves sync in together when we’re playing music together, like it’s a really profound connection. That’s why we all feel it. I think it’s a real impoverishment that we only seem to be able to listen to it by ourselves, with our headphones in, or go to a really expensive concert with a lot of strangers. Where’s the middle bit, where we just play music together?

I was just thinking that the other day, when you’re in an orchestra together, or singing in a choir together, there’s this resonance that’s really magical.

Is there anything you’d like to add for our readers?
MHM: Only that, it’s probably there in the PBS version – but also more in the longer version, that this problem of women disappearing from composing or not being in composing, is not a past problem. There’s still an incredibly low level of female composers; there’s very little women’s music programming in orchestras. If anything, we need to support our musicians today, male and female. The problem is that there’s very little opportunity for living composers to have their music performed. It’s not like you’re hearing the amazing music of our time; and we’re not providing ways for people to come forward and get amazing, because there’s nowhere for them to go. In Mozart’s time, there was new music all the time. When you went to the concerts, you wanted to hear new music. Now we have a situation where most of the classical music is the same ten composers most of them time, and people are struggling to get audiences to go because it’s expensive to see a concert. But we do need to look at ways we can [be more inclusive] in the programming, because that will benefit everyone.

Even with conductors – it’s still mostly men.
MHM: And in contemporary music, if you look at music producers, there’s very few women in there too. It’s the classic thing of follow the money – and when you do that, it’s really revealing. Just systematically, when you go up through the ranks of music, there’s less and less and women. There’s no reason for it, other than just the system is set-up wrong.

Yes, women are more than 50 percent of the population.
MHM: It’s interesting – look, are women less creative than men, or less musical than men? Clearly not. As you go up through the echelons of music, classical and non-classical, there’s just less women all the way up and that has to do with status and power and money.

Learn more about Madeleine’s film and photographic work on her website. Watch Secrets of the Dead “Mozart’s Sister,” and many more episodes and seasons, on-demand via KLCS|Passport And visit the official Secrets of the Dead website to learn more.