“A gesture from her little finger ran like an electric shock through our souls.”
When Fanny Mendelssohn played an original composition for her father’s birthday at the age of fourteen, his response was that while her younger brother Felix’s profession may be that of a musician and composer, for her music was an ornamentation, “it could and must be an element that determines your being and your actions” but that “…the only possible trade for a girl (is) being a housewife.” Despite this, Fanny went on to compose approximately 460 pieces of music over her lifetime. Though she initially published a handful of songs under her brother Felix’s name, it was only after her father’s death, and less than a year before her own, that she finally published a few of her compositions under her own name for the first time.
Fanny married the painter Wilhelm Hensel with whom she shared a deeply creative bond. Throughout her years as a wife and mother, Fanny would continue the tradition her own mother had begun, hosting salon concerts, or Sunday musicales in the family home, at times with as many as three hundred guests in attendance. Here, she would perform her original compositions, and sometimes even conducted her own chamber music pieces. As one musician in attendance recalled, “A gesture from her little finger ran like an electric shock through our souls.”
Playing for Queen Victoria, Felix Mendelssohn, who was her Majesty’s preferred composer, asked which of his pieces was the Queen’s favorite. She answered with “Italien,” one of his Songs Without Words. Felix reportedly blushed and admitted to the queen that this particular composition had in fact been written by his sister, Fanny.
The siblings remained close throughout their lifetimes and deeply influenced each other’s musical works. As scholars have learned more about her compositions, it has become understood that it may have been Fanny, or possibly Felix and Fanny in collaboration, who first created the piano style known as “Songs Without Words,” which previously has always been associated with and attributed to Felix.
After only briefly enjoying her success at publishing compositions under her own name, Fanny died suddenly at the age of forty-one from a cerebral hemorrhage. Upon learning of her death, Felix collapsed in despair. Deeply grieving her loss, he made an effort to publish additional compositions by his beloved sister until his own death, which followed only six months later.
Until the 1980’s Fanny Hensel’s compositions by and large remained locked away in the Berlin State Library and have only been made available for publication through recent efforts. One such effort is the online project Hensel Pushers, where you can find everything Fanny Hensel, including digital copies of her works, many of them for the first time.
