Fanny Cäcilie Hensel née Mendelssohn (14 November 1805 – 14 May 1847) was a German composer and pianist of the early Romantic era, also known as Fanny Mendelssohn Bartholdy. Her compositions number over 450, and include a string quartet, a piano trio, a piano quartet, an orchestral overture, four cantatas, more than 125 pieces for solo piano, and over 250 lieder. Most of these were unpublished in her lifetime. Although lauded for her piano technique, she rarely gave public performances outside her family circle.
She grew up in Berlin and received a thorough musical education from teachers including her mother, as well as the composers Ludwig Berger and Carl Friedrich Zelter. Her younger brother Felix Mendelssohn, also a composer and pianist, shared the same education and the two developed a close relationship. Owing to her family's reservations and to social conventions of the time about the roles of women, six of her songs were published under her brother's name in his Opus 8 and 9 collections. In 1829, she married artist Wilhelm Hensel and, in 1830, they had their only child, Sebastian Hensel. In 1846, despite the continuing ambivalence of some of her family (but not her husband) toward her musical ambitions, Fanny Hensel published a collection of songs as her Opus 1. She died of a stroke in 1847, aged 41.
Since the 1990s, her life and works have been the subject of more detailed research. Her Easter Sonata was inaccurately credited to her brother in 1970, before new analysis of documents in 2010 corrected the attribution. The Fanny & Felix Mendelssohn Museum opened on 29 May 2018 in Hamburg, Germany.
Fanny Mendelssohn was born in Hamburg, the oldest of four children, including her brother Felix Mendelssohn born four years after her. She was descended on both sides from distinguished Jewish families; her parents were Abraham Mendelssohn (who was the son of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn), and Lea Salomon, a granddaughter of the entrepreneur Daniel Itzig. She was baptised as a Christian in 1816, becoming Fanny Cäcilie Mendelssohn Bartholdy. Despite this, she and her family continued an affinity with the social and moral values of Judaism. She objected strongly when their father Abraham changed the family surname to "Mendelssohn Bartholdy" with the intention of playing down their Jewish origins: she wrote to her brother Felix of "Bartholdy, that name which we all dislike."
While growing up in the family's new home in Berlin, Mendelssohn showed prodigious musical ability and began to write music. She received her first piano instruction from her mother, who may have learned the Berlin Bach tradition through the writings of Johann Kirnberger, a student of Johann Sebastian Bach. Thus as a 14 year old, Mendelssohn could already play all 24 preludes from Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier from memory alone, and she did so in honour of her father's birthday in 1819. Beyond inspiration from her mother, Mendelssohn may also have been influenced by the role-models represented by her great-aunts Fanny von Arnstein and Sarah Levy, both lovers of music—the former the patroness of a well-known salon and the latter a skilled keyboard player.
After studying briefly with the pianist Marie Bigot in Paris, Mendelssohn and her brother Felix received piano lessons from Ludwig Berger and composition instruction from Carl Friedrich Zelter. At one point, Zelter favoured Fanny over Felix: he wrote to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1816, in a letter introducing Abraham Mendelssohn to the poet, "He has adorable children and his oldest daughter could give you something of Sebastian Bach. This child is really something special." Both Mendelssohn and her brother Felix received instruction in composition from Zelter starting in 1819. In October 1820, they joined the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin, which was then being led by Zelter. Much later, in an 1831 letter to Goethe, Zelter described Fanny's skill as a pianist with the highest praise for a woman at the time: "... she plays like a man." Visitors to the Mendelssohn household in the early 1820s, including Ignaz Moscheles and Sir George Smart, were equally impressed by both siblings.
The music historian Richard Taruskin suggested that "the life of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel is compelling proof that women's failure to 'compete' with men on the compositional playing-field has been the result of social prejudice and patriarchical mores (which in the nineteenth century granted only men the right to make the decisions in bourgeois households)." Such attitudes were shared by Mendelssohn's father, who was tolerant, rather than supportive, of her activities as a composer. In 1820, he wrote to her, "Music will perhaps become his [i.e. Felix's] profession, while for you it can and must be only an ornament". Although Felix was privately broadly supportive of her as a composer and a performer, he was cautious (professedly for family reasons) of her publishing her works under her own name. He wrote:
From my knowledge of Fanny I should say that she has neither inclination nor vocation for authorship. She is too much all that a woman ought to be for this. She regulates her house, and neither thinks of the public nor of the musical world, nor even of music at all, until her first duties are fulfilled. Publishing would only disturb her in these, and I cannot say that I approve of it.
The music historian Angela Mace Christian has written that Fanny Mendelssohn "struggled her entire life with the conflicting impulses of authorship versus the social expectations for her high-class status ...; her hesitation was variously a result of her dutiful attitude towards her father, her intense relationship with her brother, and her awareness of contemporary social thought on women in the public sphere." Felix's friend Henry Chorley wrote of Fanny: "Had Madame Hensel been a poor man's daughter, she must have become known to the world by the side of Madame Schumann and Madame Pleyel as a female pianist of the highest class", suggesting that as well as her sex, her social class was limiting for her career.
The biography of the Mendelssohn family compiled from family documents by Fanny's son Sebastian Hensel has been construed by the musicologist Marian Wilson Kimber as intending to represent Fanny as having no aspirations to perform outside the private sphere. Kimber notes that Fanny's "oft-reported longing for a professional music career is not supported by her ... diaries, which are somewhat surprising for how little they reveal about her musical life."
The siblings' bond was strengthened by their shared passion for music. Fanny's works were often played alongside her brother's at the family home in Berlin in a Sunday concert series (Sonntagskonzerte), which was originally organized by her father and after 1831 carried on by Fanny herself. In 1822, when Fanny was 17 and Felix 13, she wrote "Up to the present moment I possess his [Felix's] unbounded confidence. I have watched the progress of his talent step by step, and may say I have contributed to his development. I have always been his only musical adviser, and he never writes down a thought before submitting it to my judgment."
In 1826/1827 Felix arranged with Fanny for some of her songs to be published under his name, three in his Op. 8 collection and three more in his Op. 9. In 1842, this resulted in an embarrassing moment when Queen Victoria, receiving Felix at Buckingham Palace, expressed her intention of singing to the composer her favourite of his songs, Italien (to words by Franz Grillparzer), which Felix confessed was by Fanny.
Fanny's support of Felix's music was clearly demonstrated during the 1838 rehearsals in Berlin for her brother's oratorio St. Paul at the Singverein, which she attended at the invitation of its conductor, Carl Friedrich Rungenhagen. In a letter to her brother she described attending the rehearsals and "suffering and champing at the bit ... as I heard the whining and [the accompanist's] dirty fingers on the piano ... They started [the passage] 'mache dich auf' at half the right tempo, and then I instinctively called out, 'My God, it must go twice as fast!'" The consequence was that Rungenhagen consulted her closely about all details of the rehearsals and performance; this included her firm instructions not to add a tuba to the organ part. "I assured them that they should be ruled by my word, and they'd better do it for God's sake."