1805–1847 · Romantic
Fanny Mendelssohn (1805–1847) was a German pianist and composer, the elder sister of Felix Mendelssohn. From an early age she received a broad musical education, led Sunday concerts at her parents' home for many years, and wrote songs for voice and piano to poems by Goethe, Heine and other poets. The site holds her songs at various levels of difficulty, from elementary+ to advanced.
Fanny Mendelssohn was born on 14 November 1805 in Hamburg. She was the oldest of four children: four years after her, her brother Felix was born, who also became a composer and pianist. Her father Abraham Mendelssohn came from the family of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, and her mother Lea was a granddaughter of the entrepreneur Daniel Itzig; Fanny's uncle was the banker Joseph Mendelssohn. Fanny received her first piano lessons from her mother. In 1816 the girl was baptised, and she began to be known as Fanny Cäcilie Mendelssohn Bartholdy.
For a short time Fanny took lessons from the Paris-based pianist Marie Bigot; afterwards she studied piano with Ludwig Berger and composition with Carl Friedrich Zelter. In 1820 she and her brother Felix joined the Berlin Sing-Akademie, led by Zelter. As early as 1816 Zelter had written to Goethe that Abraham Mendelssohn's eldest daughter could give him a sense of Sebastian Bach's music — that was how highly he valued her playing. Goethe, for his part, admired Fanny's voice and dedicated a poem to her in 1827.
A musical correspondence between brother and sister continued throughout their lives. Fanny gave Felix advice on his compositions, and he always considered it carefully, sometimes rewriting whole pieces based on her remarks. In 1838, during the Berlin rehearsals of Felix's oratorio St Paul, she attended at the invitation of conductor Carl Friedrich Rungenhagen; he consulted her about every detail of the rehearsals and performance, including her insistence that a tuba should not be added to the organ line.
In 1822, when Fanny was seventeen and Felix thirteen, he consulted her in detail about every idea of his. In their correspondence of 1840–1841 brother and sister discussed a plan for an opera based on the Nibelungenlied — it was never written.
In 1829 Fanny became the wife of the Berlin-based painter Wilhelm Hensel; his sister was the poet Luise Maria Hensel. The following year, 1830, the couple's only son, Sebastian, was born. Sunday concerts had long been held at the family's Berlin home: they were begun by her father, and from 1831 Fanny herself took charge of them. These concerts featured music by Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, along with works by her brother Felix and her own.
Because of the family's misgivings and the era's prevailing ideas about occupations proper for a woman, some of Fanny's songs appeared under Felix's name — three in his Opus 8 and three more in his Opus 9. Felix himself supported his sister as a composer and performer, but he did not encourage her to publish works under her own name.
In 1820 her father wrote to Fanny that music could become a profession for Felix, while for her it could and should remain only one of life's ornaments. Felix's friend Henry Chorley later wrote that had Fanny been a poor man's daughter, she would have become known to the public as a pianist of the highest class, alongside Clara Schumann and Pleyel.
The musicologist Angela Mace Christian noted that Fanny wrestled throughout her life with the tension between wanting to publish and the expectations placed on a woman of her class — a hesitation shaped by her dutiful attitude towards her father, by her close tie to her brother, and by her sense of how contemporaries viewed women in public life. The Mendelssohn family biography was compiled by her son, Sebastian Hensel; the musicologist Marian Wilson Kimber notes that the book presents Fanny as having no wish to perform beyond the private circle, even though her own diaries reveal remarkably little about the details of her musical life.
In 1839–1840 Fanny travelled through Italy with her husband and son. It was the first time she had travelled to southern Europe, and she returned feeling invigorated. She and her family got to know young French musicians who had received the Prix de Rome, Charles Gounod among them, and his admiration for her music boosted her own confidence. Afterwards she got to know a Berlin devotee of music, Robert von Keudell, who studied every new piece of hers with great care and, as she recorded in her own diary, always gave her excellent advice.
In 1846 two Berlin publishers approached Fanny, and without consulting her brother she decided to bring out a collection of her songs as her Opus 1, under her married name, Hensel. Felix reacted approvingly, although, judging by her diary entry, he was not entirely satisfied deep down; nevertheless he wrote his sister warm words on the publication of the collection.
In March 1847 she met often with Clara Schumann. Fanny was then writing her Piano Trio, Op. 11, and Clara had just finished her own Piano Trio, Op. 17 — a work Clara may possibly have wanted to dedicate to her.
On 14 May 1847 Fanny died in Berlin; complications from a stroke overtook her while she was rehearsing The First Walpurgis Night, one of her brother's cantatas. After her death Felix sank into a deep depression and died from the same illness a few months later. She was buried beside her parents in Berlin's Trinity Cemetery, in the section reserved for Jewish converts to Christianity.
Six months before he died, Felix gathered a great many of his sister's compositions, meaning to bring them out through his own publisher, Breitkopf & Härtel. From 1850 the firm issued these previously unpublished pieces, beginning with the set Vier Lieder, Op. 8.
Since the 1980s, interest in Fanny Mendelssohn and her music has revived. In 2000 the musicologist Renate Hellwig-Unruh compiled a catalogue of her works, under which each piece was given its own H-U number. In 2023 Sheila Hayman, Fanny Mendelssohn's great-great-great-granddaughter, released the documentary film Fanny: The Other Mendelssohn.
All of her works featured on the site are songs for voice and piano — 32 editions in total. Such songs (Lieder) made up a substantial part of her creative legacy: among Fanny Mendelssohn's more than 450 compositions are over 250 songs for voice and piano, as well as a string quartet, a piano quartet, a piano trio, an orchestral overture, and four cantatas. She took words for her songs from Goethe, Heine, Lenau, Lamartine and other Romantic poets. Among her larger-scale works is a cycle of 12 piano miniatures, Das Jahr (The Year, 1841), with a short poem attached to each piece; the music of the cycle was written on coloured paper that her husband decorated.
On the site her songs are divided by level of difficulty. One, "Abendlich schon rauscht der Wald", is at elementary+ level. Four songs are at intermediate level: "Im Herbste", "Ferne", "Hörst du nicht die Bäume rauschen" and "Schöne Fremde" (the title "Im Herbste" appears once more on the site, among the upper-intermediate songs). Most songs, eighteen, are at upper-intermediate level: among them are "Schwanenlied", "Bitte", "Wanderlied", "Verlust" and "Italien". Nine songs are harder, at advanced level: "Abendbild", "Gondellied", "Frühling", "Du bist die Ruh" and others. One can start getting to know her music on the site with "Abendlich schon rauscht der Wald", then move on to "Im Herbste" and "Ferne", and after that to the more demanding "Schwanenlied" and "Abendbild".
The first public notice of her music in print appeared in 1830, when the London journal The Harmonicon praised a number of her songs. She herself rarely performed in public: according to the Mendelssohn scholar R. Larry Todd, her 1838 performance of her brother's Piano Concerto No. 1 was one of only three known public performances by Fanny Mendelssohn.
Besides songs, a substantial share of Fanny Mendelssohn's larger works consists of piano and chamber pieces. In 1822, still with Zelter's support, she wrote a piano quartet — her first large-scale composition. As R. Larry Todd has noted, working on her string quartet, she, like her brother, drew on the late music of Ludwig van Beethoven — this shows in its form, tonality and fugal writing. Fanny Mendelssohn's last large-scale work was her Piano Trio, Op. 11, written in 1847.