Women of the Arts: Fanny Mendelssohn
Fanny Mendelssohn was born into a rich family in Hamburg on the 14th of November in 1805. Her father, Abraham Mendhelsson, worked as a banker and provided a comfortable life for his family. Her mother, on the other hand, was a distinguished pianist and singer who took a great interest in Bach’s music. It was her mother, Lea, who awakened and first developed Fannys and her four-year-old brother Felix’s great interest in music. So much so that the family moved to Berlin where they continued the children’s musical education.
The siblings were educated together for a long time and even composed pieces for the same texts, after which they would compare their compositions and learn from each other. The children would perform every Sunday in their family home in front of an esteemed and qualified gathering of the city’s elites, such as authors, philosophers and scientists. Of those who came to watch these performances, known as “Sonntagsmusik‘”, were none other than Liszt, Paganini and Clara Schumann. The place in which they performed was grand, housing a couple of hundred listeners at a time. During the summer they would even open the big glass doors facing the garden where yet a bigger audience would be seated.
However, it was Felix who got the most attention from other musicians and quickly outshined his sister. He was given the opportunity to study under Cherubini in Paris and Moscheles in London. Fanny, on the other hand, was not given the same opportunities as her brother, fully aware that her dream of becoming a professional composer would be nearly impossible. On her twenty-third birthday, Fanny’s father made his expectations of her very clear. He told her that it was time she thought about marrying someone and pursuing, what was at the time, the only role of a woman in society: being a wife and mother, forced to take care of her husband and raise the kids. Upon her father’s request, she married Wilhelm Hensel. For the ceremony, she composed her own wedding march. Roughly eight months after the marriage, Fanny gave birth to Ludwig Sebastian Felix, named after her three favourite composers.
Fanny’s relationship with Wilhelm was a fulfilling one. He financed her musical ambitions, enabling her to continue pursuing her passion for composing and playing the piano. Even if taking care of her family occupied most of her time, music continued to be a large part of her life. She broadened her horizons by embarking on larger works. Among other things, she wrote an oratorio about biblical images. In 1830 she composed her only orchestral work, an Overture in C major, probably first performed at one of the family’s musical salons, but performed once more, about which she told in a letter to Felix as they kept in very close contact.
“Mother must have told you about the orchestra in Königsstadt last Saturday and how I stood with the conductor’s baton in my hand like a sounding Jupiter… I was sitting at the piano when my overture was to be played, but then Lecerf (the conductor of the orchestra) came like the devil and put down the baton in my hand. If I hadn’t been so shy and embarrassed for every beat, I might have been able to conduct reasonably well. But it was fun to hear the piece again for the first time in two years and find it all right the way I think about it.”
It was seldom that she made public appearances as a conductor or a pianist. There have only been two documented instances, both of which were at charity concerts. The first time was in 1839 when she performed as a soloist in Felix’s Piano Concerto No.2, and the second time was in 1841 in his Piano Trio No.1. Fanny described these concerts as the happiest time of her life.
However, most notable for her was when the Hensel family set off from Berlin on August 24, 1839, to go to Italy. She had prepared herself for this trip by reading Goethe’s texts about Italy, setting her expectations very high. Venice was the first stop and then they arrived in Rome on the 12th of October. She composed diligently during this time, now with new inspiration. She was greatly appreciated by those around her and felt that the social demands on her were much less. She was able to socialize with friends and colleagues in a relaxed manner and became particularly good friends with the French composer Charles Gounod, who was in Rome as the recipient of the French Academy’s Grand Rome Prize. “Madame Hensel was an incomparable musician, a remarkable pianist, a woman of superior intelligence, small and pained, but possessing an energy in her deep eyes and intense gaze. She had rare talent as a composer.”
On April 22, she composed the piano piece Abschied von Rom, a painful breakup. The departure a few months later brought the family to Naples. From there the homeward journey began on August 11, 1840, and they were again in Berlin on September 11, after traveling for over a year, in what she called “paradise on earth.” She had gained more self-confidence and wrote that “I don’t feel that I have aged, on the contrary, I feel rejuvenated.”
Felix had participated several times in performances of her songs and piano pieces. But he was still opposed to her music being published. However, Felix included six of her songs in his own song collections, op 8 (1828) and 9 (1830), without stating that Fanny composed them. After a romance concert that Felix organized in London for Queen Victoria, the Queen declared that the song Italy was the finest during the entire concert. It had in no way emerged from the program sheets that it was actually Fanny who wrote it.
It took until 1837 before she had a song published for the first time, Die Schiffende was then published in an anthology. It would take another ten years before she would again see her own name on a printed work. In time, she would become an extraordinarily prolific composer.
In the summer of 1846, she decided to take matters into her own hands and had her opus 1-5 published. Stricken with a guilty conscience, Felix took it upon himself to publish her opus 6-10 shortly after her death. These collections contain 18 piano pieces – all under the heading Songs without Words – and 29 songs. He chose songs from different times (1823-1847) in all the collections. Her last major work, the piano trio, which she premiered at the first Sunday concert in 1847. It was published in 1850 as opus 11. Her very last work, the song Bergeslust, was dated the day before she died. There are no other opus-numbered works, but quite a few have come out of print in recent years.
Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel died of a stroke on 14 May 1847 – aged just 41 – while leading a rehearsal of Felix’s choral piece Die erste Walpurgisnacht. Felix also died of a stroke, already six months later. They were buried at the Alte Dreifaltigkeit Kirchhof in Berlin. Felix on her right and husband Wilhelm, who died in 1861, on the left.
