Talkin’ about Fanny (Mendelssohn) with author R. Larry Todd

“The Other Mendelssohn” is the name of musicologist R. Larry Todd’s latest book, a thorough-going biography of Fanny Mendessohn Hensel that uncovers lots of unknown material, perhaps most importantly about the large number of her own works as a composer.

If you’re currently busy surfing the web, then you may be like me and not have sat down, turned off the media and read a good music biography in more than a while.

So, in honor of Women’s History Month, the author has been good enough to give people like us some highlights of Fanny’s life and almost forgotten reputation.

What’s the biggest misconception in the public about Fanny Mendlessohn?

We used to think of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel as a talented sister of Mendelssohn who wrote some well-turned songs and short piano pieces in a style largely beholden to her brother.  When I began working on my biography of Felix (Mendelssohn, a Life in Music), this was the conventional wisdom about her, and I attempted in that book to take a fresh look at her music and relationship to her brother.

Until the 1990s, few had a clue that in fact she produced well over four hundred compositions, including an orchestral overture, string quartet and other chamber works, piano sonatas, a large-scale piano cycle on the months of the year, choral part-songs, a setting of a scene from Goethe’s Faust, concert arias, and several cantatas, including one, in fifteen movements, that resembles a small-scale oratorio.

The assumption has always been that Fanny did not have her own compositional voice, that she belonged to a group of composers, such as Robert Schumann in his string quartets, the young Charles Gounod,the young Arthur Sullivan, etc., who formed a kind of Mendelssohn school.  In fact, her music does show stylistic signs of differentiation from her brother–the music is more free in form, more experimental in harmony, and epigrammatic in intensity.

Is there a distinct profile or stylistic unity to her music? How does it differ from that of Felix?

Fanny was raised in the same Berlin environment as her brother, and studied with the same teachers.  Like Felix, she was put through a rigorous course in counterpoint (she wrote 32 fugues a la Bach, most of which are lost).  And she was actively involved in performances of the music of her brother, who was about 3 1/2 years younger.  So it is not surprising that there would be stylistic similarities between the two.  Furthermore, her music often seems to refer to his, either through thinly veiled allusions or quotations or references of some sort.  That said, there are important differences.  Fanny was primarily a miniaturist, who excelled in the short Lied, or art song, and short character piece for piano.  It is likely that her lyrical, song-like piano pieces played a role in the development of the famous Lieder ohne Worte (Songs without Words), of which Felix published several dozen.  (Fanny referred to her piano pieces as Songs for the Piano.)

Fanny is harmonically more adventuresome than Felix, and fills her songs with unexpected harmonic turns to reflect or accent changes in the text.   And in her larger scale works, she is less concerned about following conventional forms than giving her imagination a freer reign.  The String Quartet (1834)  is a good example–try as one might, one cannot pin a conventional sonata form onto the first movement, which is rather more like a fantasia, a point that caused some friction between the two composers (Felix found the piece “mannered”).

Was there a rivalry between brother and sister?  Did Felix respect her as a   musician and composer?

Yes, especially in the early years, there was a sense of sibling rivalry.  When Felix wrote his first piano quartet, Fanny tried her hand at one.  And in writing her String Quartet in E-flat major in 1834, she was in part responding to Felix’s earlier String Quartet in E-flat major of 1827.  While the parents seem initially to have promoted the rivalry (they studied with the same teachers), in 1820, when Fanny was fourteen, the father drew a clear line–while music might become Felix’s profession, it was to remain an “ornament,” as he termed it, for Fanny’s life.  And so, while Felix was encouraged to compose symphonies and operas, Fanny was expected to focus on smaller songs and piano pieces for domestic use.

Be that as it may, both Felix and Fanny were child prodigies, and it is clear that Felix deeply respected her talents as a pianist and composer.  She  was his own “worst” crtic, and offered thorough critiques of his music (when he  revised the theme from the second movement of the Italian Symphony, she didn’t  hesitate to tell him she preferred the original version).  Felix referred to  Fanny as his Minerva, after the Roman goddess of wisdom, and his Thomaskantor, i.e., likening her to J. S. Bach.  And he found her songs to be among the very best examples of the genre.

What was the relationship with her husband – respectful, distant, intimate?

In 1829 Fanny married Wilhelm Hensel, who was a painter and portraitist  who had fought in the Napoleonic Wars before obtaining a position in Berlin at the court of the Prussian king.  Hensel came from a family of modest means  and was, musically and socio/economically, out of his league when he married into a wealthy family with two musical geniuses.  But he insisted that Fanny continue to compose, and supported her decision late in life to begin publishing her music under her own name.  The married couple’s lifestyle was compared to a “double counterpoint of music and painting.”  Wilhelm would paint while Fanny composed and played the piano.  An amateur poet, Wilhelm wrote several poems that Fanny set, and he collaborated in her composition by adorning several of her manuscripts with vignettes, usually placed in the upper left-hand  corner of the music paper, with the effect that the painting spilled over into  the music.

The Hensels had one son, whom Fanny named Sebastian Ludwig Felix Hensel, after her three most favorite composers.

Did she have traditional wifely duties in the home and squeeze in time for   composition?

Yes, Fanny organized the household, raised her son, Sebastian, organized her husband’s business affairs, kept a diary, ran a fortnightly concert series in her home attended by 200 guests, and composed throughout her life.  When her father died in 1835, she put away her diary, and in effect her music  became her diary.

The concerts were spectacular events that featured a chorus directed by Fanny from the piano (they performed Bach cantatas, Handel oratorios, Gluck operas, and, of course, music of Mendelssohn).  The guest list included a number of celebrities–Franz Liszt, the Schumanns, the young Joseph Joachim, Charles Gounod, and non-musical figures luminaries such as Hans Christian Andersen.   

Did she have an erotic life?

Very few clues from the diaries or letters.  I’ll only say that the nineteenth-century image of the Mendelssohns as depicted by Fanny’s son, Sebastian, in The Mendelssohn Family, a two-volume work published in the 1870s that ran through many editions well into the twentieth century, was one of “upstanding” Lutheran burghers (grandchildren of the Jewish Enlightenment philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, Fanny and Felix were baptized on March  21, 1816, as it happened, the birthday of J. S. Bach).  But anyone reading their letters knows that they had an irrepressible joie de vivre.  They were no prudes, notwithstanding the old, popular literature.   

Did she have female confidants?

Yes–Clara Schumann for one.  Clara intended to dedicate her Piano Trio in G minor to Fanny, but Fanny died before Clara could do so.  Fanny’s mother, Lea, was a gifted pianist who make a practice of playing the Well-Tempered Clavier of Bach (when Fanny was fourteen, she played half of the WTC preludes  by memory for her father).  Fanny’s sister, Rebecka, was a pianist for whom Fanny  composed her Piano Trio in D minor.  And Fanny knew well the leading opera  singers active or concertizing in Berlin, including Clara Novello and Jenny Lind.

Who heard her music during her lifetime?  Did she herself hear most of her  works performed live?

Very little of it was published during her lifetime–initially, just a  few songs brought out under her brother’s name in his early song collections, or  released anonymously. One year before her death she did begin publishing her  music under name, and a few reviews began to appear.  Then, she died of a stroke in  May 1847 (Felix died of strokes a few months later).  A few more pieces were published, up to Op. 11, and then virtually nothing until late in the twentieth century.

Fanny only appeared in public as a pianist three times, all on charity  concerts when she performed music by Felix.  The reasons she did not have a public career were twofold–one, her gender, but two, her standing in a wealthy, upper-class Berlin family that guarded its privacy (in contrast, Clara  Schumann was from a middle-class family, so it was acceptable in the society of  the time for Clara to have an international career as a pianist and composer).  Given that a public career was not an option for Fanny, she created her special musical space in the music room of the Mendelssohn residence, where she gave her concerts.  This was a venue that was lodged somewhere between the public and private realms–public, because there were one or two hundred in the audience; private, because the concerts were by invitation only, there was no press, no reviews, etc.  We have some records about the programs, and it is clear that Fanny performed some of her works on these concerts.  But most of her music was for private, domestic use, and for her immediate circle of friends.   

What inspiration or lessons can amateur composers or women composers of  today draw from her life?

Fanny composed from an inner need to compose.  Though the social attitudes of the time severely restricted her creativity, she was able to produce an impressive body of work that is now being discovered, performed, and  discussed, as it certainly should be.  The music is spontaneous, and honest–it reflects her view of the world around her, and not the fashions of the time, or  what the critics may have thought. In a certain sense, it is music making at its best.