The Guardian view on female composers: a forgotten musical powerhouse
The history of women overshadowed and elbowed aside by men is nowhere more dispiriting than in classical composing, but turn that proposition on its head and there are discoveries to be made that refresh the canon. The story of “the other Mendelssohn” is a case in point. Fanny Hensel – her married name – was the talented older sister of Felix Mendelssohn. She learned composition alongside her brother, but was confined as an adult to organising and performing in Sunday music salons at the Berlin home of their wealthy banking family. By the time she died, aged 41, she had composed more than 400 pieces. Mendelssohn is known to have passed some of her songs off as his own, as embarrassingly revealed during a singalong with one of his great cheerleaders, Queen Victoria.
But history seldom marches in straight lines. Though Mendelssohn prevented his sister from publishing her music, on the grounds that it “would only disturb her in her primary duties of managing her house”, he was very supportive of another female composer of their circle, Clara Schumann. Nor was he responsible for the misattribution of Fanny’s Easter Sonata, which – in a much later example of patriarchal presumption – was assumed to have been his work when the manuscript was discovered in a Paris bookshop in 1970 under the name F Mendelssohn.
Only 40 years later did a young female musicologist, Angela Mace Christian, recognise the sonata as a piece that Fanny had once mentioned, composed when she was just 22 years old. Ms Mace Christian is among a crowd of female musicians and academics who have been instrumental in rescuing voices of women from obscurity. Rediscovery is not itself enough, though. They also need to be projected with a conviction and charisma that makes sceptics sit up and listen. So a new documentary, Fanny: The Other Mendelssohn, is very welcome. It is directed by the composer’s great-great-great granddaughter, Sheila Hayman, with Isata Kanneh-Mason – who has also recorded Clara Schumann’s music – representing Fanny at the piano.
There are many other such champions. The Renaissance and baroque singers Musica Secreta have delved deep into the radical musical heritage of Italian convents, earning a listing among the best tracks of 2022 from the New York Times. A young, femaleled company specialising in Gothic opera last year unearthed curiosities by two 19th-century French composers, Louise Bertin and Pauline Viardot, both stars in their day. Bertin and Viardot’s adventures in gothic opera may not be masterpieces, but they add to our understanding of a multidisciplinary movement that has a huge influence on popular culture today.
In 1987, a retired urban planner from South Africa listed 5,000 female composers in a two-volume encyclopaedia that was a labour of love. Seven years later, the New Grove Dictionary of Women Composers featured only 875. The gap is telling. “Whether in the courts of Florence or Versailles, the great houses of Berlin or Vienna, the crowded streets of Paris or Leipzig, or even a quiet English village, in every generation women evaded, confronted and ignored the beliefs and practices that excluded them from the world of composition,” wrote the musicologist Anna Beer in Sounds and Sweet Airs, a fine history of eight of those women. Many more are waiting to be rediscovered. We need more films and plays about them. Above all, we need more performances of their work.