Maria Anna 'Nannerl' Mozart died in Salzburg at age 78, having outlived her brother Wolfgang by nearly four decades.
Maria Anna Mozart died on 29 October 1829 in Salzburg, at the age of 78, having spent her final years in declining health, including blindness in her later years. She had returned to Salzburg after the death of her husband, Johann Baptist Franz von Berchtold zu Sonnenburg, in 1801, and lived there for the remainder of her life, giving piano lessons and remaining a respected, if largely private, figure in the city's musical memory.
Her death is historically significant as it closed the final living link to the childhood of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and the extraordinary touring years of the Mozart family. In her later life, she was visited by early biographers and Mozart scholars, including Georg Nikolaus von Nissen (husband of Wolfgang's widow Constanze) and others gathering material for early biographies of her brother; her recollections and preserved letters became invaluable primary sources for understanding Wolfgang's childhood and the family's touring life.
Nannerl's later-life correspondence and the fragments of a diary she kept as a girl (used by Wolfgang's biographers) preserved crucial details about the family's daily life, travels, and Wolfgang's early compositions, cementing her indirect but essential contribution to musicology and Mozart studies. Her death marked the end of an era, but her legacy persisted through these historical records and through renewed scholarly and popular interest in her own considerable but historically overshadowed musical gifts.