FannyHensel

On 9 July 1846 Fanny Hensel wrote to her brother Felix with news she expected him to dislike. A Berlin publisher had offered good terms for her songs, and she had accepted. “In a word, I am beginning to publish,” she wrote, after a long and uneasy preamble about her wish to please the people she loved. She was forty. She had been composing since childhood and directed some of Berlin’s most distinguished private concerts.

Hamburg and BerlinEarly training with Berger and Zelter

Born in Hamburg on 14 November 1805, Fanny was the eldest child of the banker Abraham Mendelssohn and his wife Lea. The family moved to Berlin in 1811. Her grandfather was the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, an advocate of Jewish civil equality; Abraham and Lea had their four children baptised as Protestants in 1816, and later added Bartholdy to the family name. Fanny’s first piano teacher was her mother. As a child she learnt all twenty-four preludes of the first book of Bach’s Well-⁠Tempered Clavier by heart and played them to her father.

Fanny and Felix studied piano with Ludwig Berger and composition with Carl Friedrich Zelter. They joined Zelter’s Sing-⁠Akademie in 1820; at home, professional players took part in the family concerts, so the children could hear what they had written. Their father nevertheless planned different futures for them. Writing to Fanny in 1820, he assigned music to Felix as a possible profession and to her as an accomplishment. She went on filling her composition books with songs, fugues and sonatas.

Leipziger Straße 3Marriage and the Sunday concerts

In October 1829 she married the painter Wilhelm Hensel. He encouraged her composition and wanted her to publish. They settled in the garden apartment of her parents’ property; their son Sebastian was born the following June. In 1831 Fanny revived the family’s Sunday concerts under her own direction. The concerts were held at a private address. She chose the programmes, rehearsed a choir of about twenty voices, played the piano and directed the performances. Liszt, the Schumanns and the Humboldt brothers were among the visitors.

Her programmes could accommodate an opera or an oratorio. She presented Gluck’s Orpheus in 1833 and Felix’s St Paul in 1837. In 1831 she herself composed three large sacred works, including Lobgesang, associated with Sebastian’s first birthday, and a cantata marking the end of Berlin’s cholera epidemic. The following year brought an Overture in C major.

On 15 June 1836 she sent two piano pieces to the family friend Karl Klingemann in England, hoping they might find someone to play them. She wrote that her sister Rebecka no longer wanted to sing and that her songs lay unheard. Felix was often away. “And so I am quite alone with my music.” That November she told Felix that she stood over publication “like the donkey between two bundles of hay”. Wilhelm wanted it, and Felix opposed it.

The E♭ major String Quartet of 1834 opens with a slow movement containing a minor-key fugue. The quick second movement also moves repeatedly towards minor keys. The third, a Romanze, passes through harmonies remote from the nominal home key. Felix criticised her handling of form. She left the quartet as she had written it.

1839–⁠41Rome and Das Jahr

The Hensels went to Italy in 1839–⁠40. At the Villa Medici in Rome, Fanny met young French musicians who wanted to hear everything she could play. One of them was Charles Gounod, for whom her Bach was a revelation. She also played Beethoven. On 30 May 1840, shortly before her departure, she played the Allegro of a Beethoven sonata in A major, and Gounod begged on his knees for the Adagio.

The cycle requires a pianist with considerable stamina and enough control to sustain a long note through a run of shorter ones. In places a hymn interrupts the faster figuration. Each month has its own character, and transitions link one month to the next. When she began publishing piano pieces, she took September out of the cycle and included it in Op. 2 without its month’s name.

1846–⁠47Into print

Robert von Keudell, a younger friend who took a close interest in her new music, encouraged publication, and the Berlin firms Schlesinger and Bote & Bock made offers. After her decision in July 1846, songs appeared in print as Op. 1 and piano pieces as Op. 2. The Gartenlieder, Op. 3, were six pieces for unaccompanied voices. Felix eventually sent his blessing. By then Fanny had already dealt with the publisher herself.

The Trio appeared in 1850 as Op. 11. Much else was published far later, or circulated under the wrong name. Her Easter Sonata of 1828 was recorded in the twentieth century as a work by Felix. When the scholar Angela Mace examined the manuscript, its handwriting and page numbers matched the missing leaves of Fanny’s composition book. In her diary for April 1829 Fanny had written that she had played her own sonata.