User:Ben Novotny/Fanny Mendelssohn

Fanny Mendelssohn
Fanny Hensel, 1842, by Moritz Daniel Oppenheim
Born	14 November 1805 Hamburg, Germany
Died	14 May 1847 Berlin, Germany
Occupations	Composer Pianist
Spouse	Wilhelm Hensel
Children	1

Fanny Mendelssohn (14 November 1805 – 14 May 1847), later Fanny [Cäcilie] Mendelssohn Bartholdy and, after her marriage, Fanny Hensel, was a German composer and pianist from the Romantic era. She grew up in Berlin, Germany and received a thorough musical education that was started by her mother and completed by Ludwig Berger and Carl Friedrich Zelter. Her brother Felix Mendelssohn, also a composer and pianist, shared the same education and the two developed a close relationship. Due to social expectations for women at the time discouraging the publication of her compositions, a number of her works were published under her brother's name in his Opus 8 and 9 collections. In 1829, she married painter Wilhelm Hensel and had a single child, Sebastian Hensel. In 1846, she broke with gender norms and published a collection of songs as her Opus 1. The next year, she suddenly died of a stroke.

She composed over 460 pieces of music, including a piano trio, a piano quartet, an orchestral overture, four cantatas, over 125 pieces for the piano, and an excess of 250 Lieder, most of which went unpublished in her lifetime. Details about her life and work have been identified since the 1990s. Her Easter Sonata was inaccurately credited to her brother in 1970, before analysis of new documents in 2010 corrected the error.

The Fanny & Felix Mendelssohn Museum opened on May 29, 2018 in Hamburg, Germany.

Life

Fanny Mendelssohn, sketched by her future husband Wilhelm Hensel

Early Life and Education

Fanny Mendelssohn was born in Hamburg, the oldest of four children, including the composer Felix Mendelssohn. She was descended on both sides from distinguished Jewish families; her parents were Abraham Mendelssohn (who was the son of philosopher Moses Mendelssohn and later changed the family surname to Mendelssohn Bartholdy), and Lea, née Salomon, a granddaughter of the entrepreneur Daniel Itzig. Her uncle was the banker Joseph Mendelssohn. She was baptised as a Christian in 1816, becoming Fanny Cäcilia Mendelssohn Bartholdy. Despite this, she and her family continued to closely hold the values of Judaism.

While growing up in the family's new home in Berlin, Mendelssohn showed prodigious musical ability and began to write music. She received her first piano instruction from her mother, who had learned the Berliner-Bach tradition through the writings of Johann Kirnberger, a student of Johann Sebastian Bach. Thus as a 14 year old, Mendelssohn could already play all 24 preludes from Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier from memory alone, and she did so in honour of her father's birthday in 1819. Beyond inspiration from her mother, Mendelssohn may also have been influenced by the role-models of her great-aunts Fanny von Arnstein and Sarah Levy, both lovers of music, the former the patroness of a well-known salon and the latter a skilled keyboard player in her own right.

After studying briefly with the pianist Marie Bigot in Paris, Mendelssohn and her brother Felix received piano lessons from Ludwig Berger and composition instruction from Carl Friedrich Zelter. At one point, Zelter favoured Mendelssohn over Felix: he wrote to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1816, in a letter introducing Abraham Mendelssohn to the poet, 'He has adorable children and his oldest daughter could give you something of Sebastian Bach. This child is really something special'. Both Mendelssohn and Felix received instruction in composition with Zelter starting in 1819. In 1820, Mendelssohn and Felix joined the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin, which was led by Zelter at the time. Much later, in an 1831 letter to Goethe, Zelter described Mendelssohn's skill as a pianist with the highest praise for a woman at the time: "She plays like a man."

Gender Limitations

Prevailing gender attitudes in Europe during the 1800s created a general expectation for women to limit their displays of musical skill to private settings, like parlors. These attitudes were shared by her father, who was tolerant, rather than supportive, of her activities as a composer. In 1820, he wrote to her, "Music will perhaps become his [i.e. Felix's] profession, while for you it can and must be only an ornament". Although Felix was privately broadly supportive of her as a composer and a performer, he was cautious (professedly for family reasons) of her publishing her works under her own name. He wrote:

From my knowledge of Fanny I should say that she has neither inclination nor vocation for authorship. She is too much all that a woman ought to be for this. She regulates her house, and neither thinks of the public nor of the musical world, nor even of music at all, until her first duties are fulfilled. Publishing would only disturb her in these, and I cannot say that I approve of it.

Felix did arrange with Mendelssohn for some of her songs to be published under his name, three in his Op. 8 collection, and three more in his Op. 9. In 1842, this resulted in an embarrassing moment when Queen Victoria, receiving Felix at Buckingham Palace, expressed her intention of singing to the composer her favourite of his songs, "Italien" (to words by Franz Grillparzer), which he confessed was by Mendelssohn.

Grave of Fanny Hensel in Berlin

The siblings' intense bond was strengthened by their shared passion for music. This resulted in musical correspondence between the two. Mendelssohn helped Felix by providing constructive criticism of pieces and projects, which he always considered very carefully. Felix would even rework pieces solely based on the suggestions she made and nicknamed her "Minerva" after the Roman goddess of wisdom. Their coordination of 1840/41 reveals that they were both outlining scenarios for an opera on the subject of the Nibelungenlied: Mendelssohn wrote 'The hunt with Siegfried's death provides a splendid finale to the second act'. For most of her life, Mendelssohn adhered to social expectations despite her underlying desire to publish, only using her musical abilities for private performances and to assist Felix's work.

Later Life and Death

In 1829, after a courtship of several years, Mendelssohn married the painter Wilhelm Hensel and the following year she had her only child, Sebastian Ludwig Felix Hensel.

Subsequently, her works were often played alongside her brother's at the family home in Berlin in a Sunday concert series (Sonntagskonzerte), which was originally organised by her father, and after 1831 carried on by Mendelssohn herself.

Wilhelm was supportive of Mendelssohn's composing and contrasted the other prominent men in her life by recommending that she publish her works. Her public debut at the piano (one of only three known public performances according to Mendelssohn scholar Larry Todd) came in 1838, when she played her brother's Piano Concerto No. 1. In 1846, she decided, without consulting Felix, to publish a collection of her songs (as her Op. 1).

Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel died in Berlin on 14 May 1847 of complications from a stroke suffered while rehearsing one of her brother's cantatas, The First Walpurgis Night. Felix himself died less than six months later from the same cause (which was also responsible for the deaths of both of their parents and of their grandfather Moses), but not before completing his String Quartet No. 6 in F minor, written in memory of his sister.

Music

Compositions

See also: List of compositions by Fanny Mendelssohn

Fanny Mendelssohn composed over 460 pieces of music. Her compositions include a piano trio, a piano quartet, an orchestral overture, four cantatas, over 125 pieces for the piano, and an excess of 250 Lieder (German art songs). A number of her songs were originally published under Felix's name in his opus 8 and 9 collections. Her piano works are often in the manner of songs, and many carry the name Lied ohne Worte (Song without Words). This style (and title) of piano music was most successfully developed by Felix Mendelssohn, though some modern scholars assert that Fanny may have preceded him in the genre. To differentiate her work, she would often use the title, Lied fur Klavier (Song for Piano).

The majority of Mendelssohn’s compositions are limited to Lieder and piano pieces as she felt her abilities did not extend to larger, more intricate compositions. After completing her Quartet, she wrote to Felix in 1835, “I lack the ability to sustain ideas properly and give them the needed consistency. Therefore Lieder suit me best, in which, if need be, merely a pretty idea without much potential for development can suffice." She was one of the only women in the world to attempt a string quartet at the time.

She also wrote, amongst other works for the piano, a cycle of pieces depicting the months of the year, Das Jahr ("The Year"). The music was written on coloured sheets of paper, and illustrated by her husband Wilhelm, with each piece accompanied by a short poem. Historians have stated that the poems, artwork and the coloured paper may represent the different stages of life, with some suggesting it represents Menselssohn's life. In a letter from Rome, Mendelssohn described the process behind composing Das Jahr:

I have been composing a good deal lately, and have called my piano pieces after the names of my favourite haunts, partly because they really came into my mind at these spots, partly because our pleasant excursions were in my mind while I was writing them. They will form a delightful souvenir, a kind of second diary. But do not imagine that I give these names when playing them in society, they are for home use entirely.

Amongst her works is the Easter Sonata written in 1828, which was unpublished in her lifetime, then discovered and attributed to her brother in 1970, before examination of the manuscript and a mention of the work in her diary finally established in 2010 that the work was hers. It was debuted in her name on 8 March 2017, International Women's Day.

Style and Form

Since the 1990s, Mendelssohn’s works and life history has increasingly gained attention, with much of the existing research focusing on her life rather than analyzing the details of her music and its style. Angela Mace, the musicologist who proved Mendelssohn's authourship of the Easter Sonata, has found that Mendelssohn was much more experimental with her Lieder than Felix, noting that her works have a "harmonic density" that serves to express emotion. Musicologist Stephen Rodgers has claimed that the relative lack of analysis of Mendelssohn’s music has left the presence of triple hypermeter in her songs mostly overlooked. He points to this type of meter being used by Mendelssohn to alter the speed of vocals in the song and to reflect emotions through distortion. He also points to a lack of tonic harmony as a recurring characteristic of her Lieder, identifying it in "Verlust" as a deliberate means to reflect the song's themes of abandonment and failing to find love. Mendelssohn's use of word painting is also acknowledged as common element of her style, being used as a musical method of stressing emotion in the song text.

She commonly used strophic form for her songs and included piano music that moved with the voice, characteristics also held by her teachers Zelter and Berger. Though the foundation created by her teachers would remain, she increasingly turned to through-composed forms as her style developed as a way to respond to elements of poetic text.

Legacy

In the six months before his death, Felix attempted to ensure that his sister received the recognition that had been withheld throughout most of her life by collecting many of her works with the intent of releasing them to the public through his publisher, Breitkopf & Hartel. In 1850, the publisher began to distribute Mendelssohn’s unreleased works, starting with Vier Lieder Op. 8.

Fanny Mendelssohn's only child Sebastian Hensel, father of the philosopher Paul Hensel and the mathematician Kurt Hensel, played a role in the historical preservation of the Mendelssohn family. He acquired 1,000 portraits from his father Wilhelm’s possession, some of which depicted the family. He also wrote a three-volume Mendelssohn family history titled Die Familie Mendelssohn 1729-1847 (1879), which chronicled the family up until Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn's deaths. The two-volume family history has been translated from German to English throughout its many editions. It was often used as a source of information about Mendelssohn’s life by many scholars until new resources emerged. Though Sebastian’s writings were useful to scholars, its purpose was to depict a socially acceptable version of the Mendelssohn family, therefore, it falsely claimed Mendelssohn had no aspirations to perform outside the private sphere.

The Fanny & Felix Mendelssohn Museum, which is dedicated to the lives of and the work of Mendelssohn and her brother Felix, opened on May 29, 2018 in Hamburg, Germany.

In recent years, her music has become better known thanks to concert performances and a number of CDs being released on labels such as Hyperion and CPO. Her reputation has also been advanced by those researching female musical creativity, though research is in its early stages.

References

Cited Sources

• Christian, Angela Mace. “Hensel [Née Mendelssohn (-Bartholdy)], Fanny Cäcilie.” Grove Music Online.
• Citron, Marcia J. "Mendelssohn(-Bartholdy), Fanny (Cäcilie)" in The New Grove Dictionary of Women Composers. Macmillan, 1994. ISBN 0-333-51598-6.
• Draper, Brian W. Text-Painting and Musical Style in the Lieder of Fanny Hensel, University of Oregon, Ann Arbor, 2012. ProQuest.
• "Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, 1805-1847." Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA. Retrieved 2020-03-27.
• Forney, Kristine, et al.The Enjoyment of Music: Essential Listening Edition with Total Access.Twelfth Edition. W. W. Norton & Company, 2015. pp. 277-278. ISBN 978-0-393-90604-2.
• Hawkins, Derek. “A Mendelssohn Masterpiece Was Really His Sister's. After 188 Years, It Premiered under Her Name.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 9 Mar. 2017.
• Hayman, Sheila. “A Fanny Mendelssohn Masterpiece Finally Gets Its Due.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 8 Mar. 2017.
• Kimber, Marian Wilson. “The ‘Suppression’ of Fanny Mendelssohn: Rethinking Feminist Biography.” 19th-Century Music, vol. 26, no. 2, 2002, pp. 113–129.
• “KomponistenQuartierHamburg.” Fanny & Felix Mendelssohn Museum " KomponistenQuartier.
• Mace, Angela R. Fanny Hensel, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, and the Formation of the Mendelssohnian Style, Duke University, Ann Arbor, 2013. ProQuest.
• Mendelssohn (Hensel), Fanny, tr. and ed. Marica Citron. The Letters of Fanny Hensel to Felix Mendelssohn (New York, 1987) ISBN 0-918728-52-5.
• "Mendelssohn's Musical Education". Cambridge University Press. Retrieved 24 January 2017.
• Rodgers, Stephen, "Fanny Hensel's Lied Aesthetic." Journal of Musicological Research. Vol. 30, Issue 3, (Sep. 2011).
• Rodgers, Stephen Draper, Brian. Text-Painting and Musical Style in the Lieder of Fanny Hensel. University of Oregon. p. 87.
• Rodgers, Stephen. “Thinking (and Singing) in Threes.” Music Theory Online, vol. 17, no. 1, Apr. 2011, doi:10.30535/mto.17.1.7.
• Sterndale Bennett, R., "The Death of Mendelssohn", in Music and Letters vol. 36 no.4, Oxford, 1955.
• The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Fanny Mendelssohn.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 19 Mar. 2020.
• Todd, R. Larry, Fanny Hensel: The Other Mendelssohn (Oxford University Press, 2010) ISBN 978-0-19-518080-0.
• Todd, R. Larry, Mendelssohn: A Life in Music (Oxford University Press, 2003) ISBN 0-19-511043-9.
• Todd, R. Larry, and Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. Mendelssohn's Musical Education: a Study and Edition of His Exercises in Composition: Oxford Bodleian Ms. Margaret Deneke Mendelssohn C. 43. Cambridge University Press, 2009.
• Worl, Gayle. “WOMEN OF HISTORIC NOTE.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 9 Mar. 1997.

Further Reading

• Conway, David. Jewry in Music: Entry to the Profession from the Enlightenment to Richard Wagner. Cambridge University Press, 2011. ISBN 978-1-107-01538-8.
• Hensel, Sebastian. The Mendelssohn Family 1729–1847 4th revised edition, 2 vols., Sampson Low, London, 1884.
• Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Felix, ed. Paul Mendelssohn Bartholdy, tr. Lady Wallace. Letters of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy from 1833 to 1847, Longman Green, London 1864.
• Tillard, Françoise, translated by Camille Naish, Fanny Mendelssohn , Amdeus Press, Portland, Oregon, c1996, ISBN 0-931340-96-9.

External links

• Citron, Marcia J. Mendelssohn, Fanny In Grove Music Online (subscriber access). Oxford Music Online, (accessed 13 February 2010).
• Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel: A Life of Music within Domestic Limits by Eugene Gates, Kapralova Society Journal.
• Influence, Individuality and Stylistic Evolution in the Music of Fanny Hensel and Felix Mendelssohn by Hye-Bin Song, Kapralova Society Journal.
• Free scores by Ben Novotny/Fanny Mendelssohn at the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP)
• Free scores by Ben Novotny/Fanny Mendelssohn in the Choral Public Domain Library (ChoralWiki)
• Free digital scores by Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel in the OpenScore Lieder Corpus
• FannyHensel.de – comprehensive site (in German)
• Hensel-Biography – some notes about the composer and her family
• Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel Piano Trio in d minor sound-bites and short bio
• Klavierstücke for piano four hands on YouTube
• Cantata "Job" (Hiob) for chorus and orchestra on YouTube
• "Sérénade de Cortez", early French Melody with French & English subtitles, on Youtube
• "Unique objet de ma tendresse", early French Melody with French & English subtitles, on Youtube