FANNY MENDELSSOHN: BRILLIANT BUT UNRECOGNISED COMPOSER-GENIUS OF THE ROMANTIC ERA

Born in Hamburg in 1805 to an affluent Jewish banking family, Fanny and the Mendelssohn household moved to Berlin six years later, when Napoleon’s army occupied the city.

In Berlin, they converted to the Lutheran faith:  Fanny and her brother, Felix, who was four years her junior, were baptized in 1816.  Both were talented as musicians.  Fanny learned to play the piano when she was a child and remained a brilliant performer and composer, although diffident and lacking in self-confidence since she was repeatedly reminded of her inferior position as a woman in the discriminatory Victorian society. Her Father, Abraham, believed that musical composition was not a career for women.  He told her, “… music will perhaps become [Felix’s] profession, while for you it can and must be only an ornament.” (Note 1)

Nevertheless, as children, she and Felix were sent to Paris for several months to study music and Fanny continued to compose, regardless of her father’s prejudice.  Both brother and sister had a close relationship.  Felix recommended not to publish her work:  instead, he published some of her pieces under his name.  Among others, there was a song called Italien, which he played for Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace.  On another occasion, when he asked the queen if he could play one of her favourite songs and she replied “Italien,” he was forced to admit it was composed by Fanny.

There was no apparent animosity between the two of them.  They inspired, depended on and interacted with each other in their creative works.  But there was always the danger that Felix received credit for compositions which she had written.  Fanny’s approximately four-hundred and sixty pieces of music included Song without Words, for

which Felix became famous.  She only published her own work, Opus 1, at the age of forty-one in 1846.  She also published a piano trio and several books of solo piano pieces.

Having been tutored by a student of J.S. Bach, Fanny’s mother taught her the piano in turn.  At the age of thirteen, Fanny could play all twenty-four preludes from Bach’s Well-tempered Klavier from memory, a significant contribution to musical presentation since it was uncommon for performed pieces to be memorized, although Clara Schumann also played from memory.  She and Fanny spent time together in March 1847, when the two women both had new Piano Trios in common:  Fanny was working on her Piano Trio Opus 11 and Clara had recently written Piano Trio Opus 17.

As for J.S. Bach, Fanny probably influenced and prompted Felix to promote Bach’s work, which he reintroduced to the public during the Romantic period after long years of neglect.

 In 1820 when she and Felix joined the Sing-Akademie in Berlin, a music society directed by composer Carl Friedrich Zelter, Zelter wrote of Fanny in a letter to his friend Goethe:  “This child really is something special.”

Because of various accolades, Fanny’s father was tolerant of her talent but not supportive.  When it came to a suitor, he disapproved of her attachment to the poor and unknown artist, Wilhelm Hensel, on the grounds that she was a mere seventeen years old.

Eventually, at the age of twenty-four, she married Wilhelm in spite of his financial shortcomings.  Encouraged by her husband to develop her musical life, she performed her own compositions on Sundays at their home.  Her only child, Sebastian Ludwig Felix Hensel, born in 1830, was named appropriately after her favourite composers, Bach, Beethoven and her brother, Felix.

She also thrived musically in the year which she, together with Wilhelm and Sebastian, spent in Italy.  Here she met a circle of admiring young French musicians who inspired an outpouring of piano music, oratorios and chamber music and, in particular, her finest work, a song cycle called Das Jahr (The Year) with a piece written for each month of the year.

She made her second public performance (her first was at the age of thirteen) in 1838 at the age of thirty-three when she played brother Felix’s Piano Concerto No 1.  Seventeen years later while rehearsing for a performance of an oratorio by Felix, she had a stroke and died immediately.  Soon after her death when Felix began to arrange publication of Fanny’s work with his own publishers, tragedy struck:  he, too, had a stroke and died six months after her.  It appeared that a heart problem ran in the Mendelssohn family.

In 2010, music experts discovered that The Easter Sonata, a work attributed to Felix since its discovery in the 1970’s was by Fanny.  As a tribute to her, it was performed under her name on International Women’s Day, 8 March, 2017.

In 2018 with the opening of the Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn Museum in Hamburg, the city of their birth, new interest was created in the work of this talented musically twinned sister and brother.

Note 1:  The Mendelssohn family (1729-1847) from letters & journals by Sebastian Hensel.  With eight portraits & drawings by Wilhelm Hensel. Published by Harper & Brothers, New York, 1882