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 ...