"I have been conducting Mozart's music for 30 years. Now I conduct it from memory"

On the wall beside the grand in the conductor Jane Glover's house are three portraits of the same man, as a pleased-looking chubster in lavender silk, a hesitant-faced teenager and a pensive adult. They are portraits of Mozart. The surrounding shelves are weighed down with manuscripts of Mozart's entire musical output. Glover, a celebrated Mozart expert, agrees she lives, as it were, alongside the genius. "He is a constant in my life. I have been conducting his music for 30 years. Now I conduct it from memory."

When she was a girl, Glover rather fancied herself as Wolfgang's older sister, Maria Anna (Nannerl). Now she has written Mozart's Women, celebrating the women in the composer's life; Nannerl, Wolfgang's senior by four and a half years, receives especially tender treatment. Like Mozart, Nannerl was taught piano by their father, Leopold. When she was seven, Leopold compiled a book for her, Pour le clavecin. At four, Wolfgang apparently picked it up and began to play. Nannerl recalled that "the boy at once showed his God-given and extraordinary talent". The book is scrawled with annotations from Leopold: "This piece was learned by Wolfgangerl on 24 January 1761, three days before his fifth birthday, between nine and nine-thirty in the evening."

When Wolfgang was seven and Nannerl 12, he took them on a tour of the royal courts of Europe. As Glover says: "Having one prodigy was special; having two was astonishing."

Mozart's earliest compositions include piano duets; one of which, K381, the Sonata in D major, was written for them to play together. There is absolute equality between the primo and the secondo parts.

As the Barbican considers the phenomenon of early genius (discussed on these pages by Mark Lythgoe), I ask Glover if she thinks Nannerl could have ever developed as a female version of Wolfgang. "She was obviously gifted and was taught very well. But somebody else came along who was just that much more brilliant. Mozart was a genius and Nannerl was an accomplished musician. That's what it comes down to. Yet I am certain that she could have had a career in music. Everyone always said her technique was lovely. Many women of her generation had careers as musicians."

So what happened? "After the death of her mother, her first obligation was to Leopold, who expected her to look after him," says Glover. "Then she had this terrible marriage to a selfish widower and went off to live in the middle of nowhere, by a lake. She couldn't even play her keyboard because it could never stay in tune."

Essentially, Nannerl is fated to keep house. "Her story, with the light of Mozart going out of her life for ever, is one of the big tragedies," says Glover. "When he eventually lost contact with her, that must have been one of the loneliest things that ever happened. Losing his music and losing him."

Yet as a frail, almost blind old lady, the last pieces she managed to play were snippets from The Magic Flute and the minuet from Don Giovanni. Glover suggests it was the action of a person stamping her association with the famous composer. Everyone close to Mozart had to resign themselves to existing in the glare of his genius; perhaps the same is true for his biographers today. "This book isn't really about Mozart's women," admits Glover. "It is about him. Through them."

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