The Forgotten Mendelssohn
Fan-tastic Facts
She was as talented as her famous brother, so why isn’t she better known? Dianne Boardman investigates.
SHE was a talented and prolific composer during the Georgian era. Sadly, for nearly two centuries, the music of Fanny Mendelsshohn Bartholdy was virtually lost to the world, with some pieces only just coming back to light.
Much of her music was originally published under the name of her much more famous brother, composer Felix Mendelssohn, and was accepted as his.
Now, experts have been able to separate the siblings’ work and Fanny’s story is finally beginning to be told.
Born in Hamburg on November 14, 1805, Fanny was the eldest of four musical children.
She was introduced to the piano by her mother, who herself had received instruction from a student of Johann Sebastian Bach.
Their father, Abraham, spotted the exceptional talent of his two eldest children, Fanny and Felix, and engaged the best teachers, even sending them to Paris to study.
Fanny was three years older than Felix, and the pair were inseparable.
Together, they studied composition, gave each other advance viewings of their work and relied heavily on the other’s opinion.
In a reflection of society of the time, Abraham expected his son to take up music as a profession, but not his daughter.
“Music will perhaps become Felix’s profession, whilst for you it can, and must, only be an ornament.”
Despite this, Fanny – who could play Bach from memory by the time she was thirteen, and had written a piano sonata by twenty-two – composed a mass of high-quality music almost continuously throughout her life, and managed to perform regularly, if only privately.
She was thirty-three before she made her first official public appearance to perform her brother’s work, and only published the first work under her own name the year she died, aged forty-one.
Felix trusted her above all others to be his chief musical advisor, and was open in admitting that his sister played the piano better than he did.
In 1820 they joined a musical society in Berlin, directed by the famous composer Carl Friedrich Zelter.
The composer was impressed with her work.
“This child really is something special.”
Although she was encouraged to compose and play music, her family did not believe that performing or publishing was respectable for a young woman.
Whilst Felix travelled Europe with his compositions and became one of the most celebrated composers of the time, Fanny stayed at home, playing only to family and friends.
Felix agreed with this decision, but nevertheless published some of her work under his name.
One might expect that health issues such as a crooked back and eyesight that necessitated thick spectacles might have damaged the prospects of a young woman in the Georgian period.
But Fanny was adored for her musical talent as well as her intelligence.
One admirer was an impoverished young artist called Wilhelm Hensel, and it was he who won her teenage heart.
But the path of true love was not to be smooth.
Fanny’s father sent Wilhelm away until he could prove himself able to keep a wife.
They were not allowed to correspond so he sent her sketches and she composed music for him.
Five years later he returned, and they married in 1829.
Fanny ended up writing her own wedding music on the eve of the ceremony, as apparently Felix failed to deliver on his promise to do it for her.
Wilhelm was totally supportive of Fanny’s music and refused to let her give it up, so she continued to compose despite domestic issues and responsibilities competing for her time.
One of her famous works, “Cholera Cantata”, was written as a result of having nursed her family through a particularly nasty cholera epidemic.
Fanny devoted months when her sister Rebecka needed her, and after her parents’ deaths she took over the tradition of Sunday concerts in the Mendelssohn home, now attracting a wide circle of excellent musicians.
Wilhelm tried to persuade her to publish her compositions, but Felix was still resistant and, without her brother’s blessing, she refused.
In June 1830, Fanny gave birth to a premature baby boy named Sebastian.
It was a difficult birth, and neither mother nor baby were expected to survive.
Wilhelm was heartbroken and sat by the bedside sketching them for all he was worth.
Even Felix arrived and frantically wrote music for them. Miraculously they both pulled through.
Sadly, two years later, Fanny’s second pregnancy resulted in a stillborn girl and a subsequent one in a late miscarriage.
Each time, it was many months before her grief would allow her even to face the piano, never mind compose again.
When she turned forty, she finally found the nerve to defy her family’s expectations, and published a collection of her songs.
She was thrilled at their reception, writing in her
Fanny’s son, Sebastian, wrote a biography of the Mendelssohn family based partly on Fanny’s diaries and letters.
The Fanny & Felix Mendelssohn Museum in Hamburg is dedicated to the lives and works of the pair. Fanny wrote over
460 pieces of music, including a piano trio and several books of solo piano works.
She wrote many works in the form “Songs Without Words”, a genre that her brother later became famous for.
Only a fraction of Fanny’s hundreds of compositions have ever been published or performed.
Her “Easter Sonata” was unpublished in
diary, “I feel as if newly born!”
Sadly, her joy was shortlived. Early the following year she suffered a stroke whilst rehearsing and died of complications on May 14, 1847.
Wilhelm poured his grief into his paintings, and the devastated Felix wrote his her lifetime, and was attributed to Felix when it was discovered in 1970. In 2010 experts realised that the work was actually Fanny’s.
It had its first performance under her name on International Women’s Day, 2017. The family spent a year travelling Italy and this happy time inspired Fanny to write “Das Jahr” (The Year). It was what she called a musical “second diary”, with each composition, written on coloured sheets of paper, representing a different month of her travels.
Short poems were arranged to accompany each piece, as well as illustrations by her husband Wilhelm.
“String Quartet No. 6” in her memory before also dying of a stroke six months later.
Fanny and Felix are buried next to each other at a Lutheran church in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Her tombstone is inscribed with a phrase from her final song.