Fanny Mendelssohn

Fanny Mendelssohn was born in Hamburg on 14 November 1805, the eldest of the four children of Abraham Mendelssohn, a wealthy banker, and Lea Salomon. She was the granddaughter of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, a great figure of the Jewish Enlightenment. According to family legend, her mother remarked at her birth that she had “Bach fugue fingers”. In 1811, fleeing the French occupation, the family moved to Berlin. The children were baptised as Protestants in 1816.

Like her brother Felix, born in 1809, Fanny received an exceptional education: languages, literature, drawing and above all music. Her mother gave her first piano lessons. At thirteen she played from memory the twenty-four preludes of the first book of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. She studied composition with Carl Friedrich Zelter, director of the Berlin Singakademie, who thought her as gifted as her brother. Felix and Fanny were inseparable and showed each other all their compositions.

But their roles were different. In 1820 her father wrote to her that music might become Felix’s profession, “while for you it can and must only be an ornament”. A woman from a good family was not to have a public career. Felix himself, despite his admiration, discouraged her from publishing. In 1827 three of her songs were published under Felix’s name in his Op. 8 and Op. 9 collections.

In 1829 she married the painter Wilhelm Hensel, court painter to Prussia, who fully supported her creative work. Every morning he placed a blank sheet of manuscript paper on her music stand to encourage her to compose. They had a son, Sebastian. From 1831 Fanny organised in the family home on the Leipziger Strasse the “Sonntagsmusiken”, Sunday concerts at which she conducted a choir and orchestra, played the piano and presented her own works and those of other composers to Berlin society.

In 1842, during Felix’s visit to England, Queen Victoria sang to him her favourite of his songs, “Italien”, believing it to be his. Felix had to admit that it had been composed by his sister. In 1839–40 Fanny made a long journey to Italy with her husband and son, one of the happiest periods of her life. In Rome, at the Villa Medici, she met the young Charles Gounod, who admired her.

The journey inspired Das Jahr (The Year, 1841), a cycle of twelve piano pieces, one for each month of the year, each accompanied by a poem and a vignette drawn by her husband. It is one of her most ambitious works. She also composed a String Quartet in E flat (1834), an Overture for orchestra, cantatas and above all more than 250 songs and many piano pieces. In all, her output numbers more than 460 compositions.

In 1846, encouraged by publishers and those around her, she finally decided to publish under her own name without waiting for her brother’s approval. Her Lieder Op. 1 and other collections appeared. Felix eventually sent his blessing. But on 14 May 1847, during a rehearsal of a work by Felix for a Sunday concert, she suffered a stroke and died that evening, aged forty-one. Felix, devastated, composed his String Quartet in F minor in her memory and died six months later.