On the morning of January 7, 2025, a fire had started in the Santa Monica mountains and Mia Ruhman, a fourth-year music composition major at The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, was recording tracks for her original pop opera, Nannerl, in her home at the Pacific Palisades. She preferred to lay down tracks in the quiet of home, and so chance had it that she was home that day rather than at UCLA.
The Santa Anna winds kicked the fire into a frenzy, and the flames began closing in on the Palisades. Ruhman took shifts with her father, spraying down her house and yard, occasionally retreating to her home studio to continue recording. Her opera was set for June and the writing had to continue.
“By midday, my house was creaking from the force of the wind,” recalled Ruhman. “You could hear it on the recording.”
The ensuing evacuation was a blizzard of action—collecting birth certificates and important documents; putting cats in makeshift carriers; packing valuables and overnight clothes into bags; checking on an elderly neighbor (who, it turned out, did not know what was happening and desperately needed Ruhman’s help). When the water to the neighborhood shut off, Ruhman and her father dropped the hoses and left their home.
By day’s end, the historic Palisades and Eaton fires had ignited—blazes that, in the days to follow, would displace thousands of residents and devastate some of Los Angeles’s most cherished neighborhoods.
It was a tragedy that Mia Ruhman couldn’t have planned for. But Ruhman did have a plan—at least as it regarded her music. She had a passion for performance early in her life. As far back as she could remember, she was writing melodies and songs. Later she joined the National Children’s Chorus, where she would meet Ian Krouse, professor of composition at The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, who would become a mentor. At 15, during a performance of Sleep by Eric Whitacre—a piece of extraordinary depth and range—she was suddenly struck by the deep wail of the tenors standing directly behind her.
“Their sound went right through me,” she said. “I knew right then that I had to write a piece for chorus.”
Ruhman hatched a plan. She would need formal training in composition, and she set her sights on The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. She began taking private lessons and applied for the Los Angeles Philharmonic Composer Fellowship for high school students, which she was awarded in 2019.
The last piece was ambitious—she wanted to write a full-fledged theatrical production. She took as her subject Maria Anna Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s older sister, affectionately called “Nannerl” by her family and friends. A child prodigy in her own right, Nannerl toured Europe as a young girl with her younger brother and father Leopold, delighting audiences. Ruhman has completed the piano vocal score and after graduation will orchestrate the score for a small orchestra for what she describes as a “pop opera.”
“It has been really hard to find a category for Nannerl,” said Ruhman. “The show is two and a half hours long, it showcases classical vocal technique, but then it also has contemporary composition elements. It’s not quite a musical, not quite a traditional opera. It just doesn’t fit well into any categories.
Like Ruhman’s opera, Nannerl’s own life defied easy categorization. She was a sensation before her younger brother became one, and her compositions were highly regarded. But her touring days came to an end when she turned eighteen and had reached marriage age. Nannerl herself would not marry for some time, but she ceded the spotlight thereafter to her younger brother.
Nannerl’s settling into private life invites analysis and speculation—why had she retreated from composition? To find the answer, Ruhman dove into Nannerl’s private letters and diary, and for mentions of her in the family letters by her father in brother. She found a young woman who found joy in everyday actions as much as big accomplishments, who revealed a sharp wit and occasional earthiness that gave her a more mischievous side.
The more Ruhman researched, the more she was committed to doing justice to Nannerl’s real personality and life experiences.
“What makes me really sad,” said Ruhman, “is when I see accounts that try to turn Nannerl into a ‘Girl Boss,’ or, maybe worse, portray her as a victim. She went on to a career in the arts at Salzburg. She even toured for the prince. She didn’t have the outsized career that some wanted, but she lived a full life.”
In short, Nannerl made her own life, even if it wasn’t in the conditions of her own choosing. It is a truth not lost on Ruhman, who remembers just how awful things felt when, back in January, she lost her home and her neighborhood.
“You have to make the decision to pick yourself up every day,” said Ruhman. “I owe a lot to my family for keeping my spirits up, and to my professors and sorority sisters who were really kind. And in the end, you have to keep going, even when things feel like they are falling apart.”