Chapter Five

Hensel

Early in the nineteenth century, the century that left Martines behind, a wealthy family from Berlin travel to Paris. It is not much of a holiday for the two eldest children, who are already marked out as musical prodigies. The girl and boy take lessons in ensemble playing from the eminent Pierre Baillot, and on the pianoforte from the renowned Marie Bigot, the pianist and composer who had been given a manuscript of the Appassionata sonata by the great Ludwig van Beethoven himself in recognition of her interpretative powers. By the time the girl is eleven, she is ‘really something special’. At thirteen she is able to perform the twenty-four preludes from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier for her father’s birthday – from memory. It is clear that something remarkable is going on. Her father continues to push the girl and her younger brother to excel and, back in Berlin, the girl learns about composition, admittedly from a somewhat old-fashioned tutor, but her love of ‘early’ music is secured by this education, just as her love of Beethoven’s music is inspired by Marie Bigot. An aunt worries that the pressure on the children, particularly the girl, is excessive, and writes to their mother: ‘the thing is decidedly blameable: the exertion is too great, and might easily have hurt her. The extraordinary talent of your children wants direction, not forcing.’ Their father is branded ‘insatiable’: the ‘best appears to him only just good enough’. And yet both children appear to thrive, looking for opportunities to please their father with their achievements. Witnesses of the girl’s ‘extraordinary talent’ believe she has the capability to rival even the father of German music, Johann Sebastian Bach.

The girl reaches the age of fourteen and suddenly everything changes. Her banker father returns from another business trip to Paris, carrying special gifts for his talented daughter and son: for her, a necklace of Scottish jewels; for him, the writing implements so that he might compose his first opera. The boy will find a public stage for his talent. The girl will find bejewelled happiness at home.

And so it came to pass. The boy, Felix Mendelssohn (or Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy as he was to become) would be celebrated as one of the century’s great composers, conductors and performers. The girl, Fanny Mendelssohn (or Fanny Hensel as she was to become), would remain a private figure, lost to music history for a century and a half.

Fanny Mendelssohn’s story is, however, not merely another tale of female creativity doomed by patriarchal strictures. Despite these strictures, and they were powerful, Fanny Mendelssohn composed more music and, moreover (some would say), more music of a higher quality, than any other composer in this book. Not only that, but she performed and conducted on a regular basis throughout her life. She was able to do this because musical activity was embedded into the Mendelssohn family’s life, and Fanny was loved and admired for her ability. As her mother wrote, Fanny is ‘musical through and through’. More specifically, she was able to do this because her father, Abraham Mendelssohn, enjoyed, appreciated and encouraged his daughter as a musician, even as a composer. It was Abraham who hired Carl Friedrich Zelter to teach Fanny the complexities of double counterpoint, and it was for Zelter that Fanny, by December 1824 and just turned nineteen, composed her thirty-second fugue.*

What Abraham objected to was his daughter performing in public or assuming any kind of professional identity. His reasons were many and would profoundly shape the complex landscape of belief in which Fanny Mendelssohn lived and worked. Fanny’s gender was, of course, one of the most significant. When she wrote to her father, alluding to, but taking care not to challenge, the disparity between her future and that of her younger brother, Felix, Abraham responded by telling Fanny that she was right to admire Felix, and correct not to wish to enter the public sphere: ‘Music will perhaps become his profession, whilst for you it can and must only be an ornament [Zierde], never the root [Grundbass] of your being and doing.’ Abraham praises Fanny for always showing herself to be ‘good and sensible in these matters’ and urges her to remain ‘true to these sentiments and to this line of conduct; they are feminine, and only what is truly feminine is an ornament to your sex’. Most crushingly, perhaps, Abraham casually acknowledges that Fanny might, in Felix’s place, ‘have merited equal approval’.

Abraham’s ideas about proper femininity imbue his critiques of his daughter’s compositions. He enjoys, for example, one particular song and has been singing it to himself all day: it is ‘bright, and has an easy, natural flow, which most of the others have not; some of them are too ambitious for the words’. The more ambitious work is dismissed, and Fanny is advised ‘to keep as much as possible to this lightness and naturalness in your future compositions’. Abraham’s understanding of femininity naturalizes brightness, lightness and being pleasing to others, and makes unnatural ambition and complexity.

Her father’s objections to Fanny entering upon any form of public, or professional, musical career were not, however, merely grounded in his views about the nature of women. Class also played its part. As a wealthy banker Abraham Mendelssohn struggled for some time with the idea that any of his children would be anything but amateurs: there was no need for his children to earn their bread by prostituting their talent. One of the many ironies of Fanny Mendelssohn’s life is that, had she been from a lower class, she might well have had a professional career. Indeed, her brother Felix supported the composers Josephine Lang and Clara Wieck (soon to be Clara Schumann) in the public performance and printing of their work. The irony was not lost on a near-contemporary, writing in 1854: had Fanny ‘been a poor man’s daughter, she must have become known to the world’.

Gender and class were powerful considerations, but Abraham Mendelssohn had yet another concern, that of religion. As a Jew, he was acutely aware of the presence of anti-Semitism in his native Prussia, whether the sporadic outbreaks of physical violence against Jews, the laws curtailing most Jews’ business dealings or the casual jibes of everyday life. The recent anti-Semitic Hep Hep riots in Bavaria were not close enough to home to provide a direct threat, but generated increased anxiety amongst the Jewish communities in Prussian Berlin. Closer to home, Zelter, Felix and Fanny’s composition teacher would in future years be revealed as a virulent anti-Semite, when his correspondence with no less a figure than Goethe was published, much to the whole family’s distress. In his letters, although not to the Mendelssohns’ faces, Zelter articulated his and many of his compatriots’ prejudice, peddling all the familiar stereotypes. Abraham ‘treats me very favourably and I can dip into his cash, for he’s become rich during the general wretchedness without, however, damaging his soul’. Felix is Zelter’s ‘fine young lad, merry and obedient’, crucially ‘a jewboy [Judensohn], but no Jew. By way of real sacrifice the father didn’t have his sons snipped and is bringing them up on the right lines; it would really be eppes rores [etwas Rares, something rare, in mock-Yiddish] if for once a jewboy became an artist.’ Zelter’s defenders in our own time argue that ‘the context makes it perfectly clear that, with his own little Jüdeln’, Zelter ‘was in his elephantine way writing humorously to Goethe’. The Mendelssohns did not see the humour, elephantine or not, and an anecdote in one of Abraham’s letters reveals the extent to which he was oppressed by the ubiquity of these attitudes. He was being introduced to Goethe, when the great man asked Abraham if he were a ‘son of Mendelssohn’. It was the first time that Abraham had heard the name of his father, the eminent philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, mentioned ‘without an epithet’, that is, without the addition of the word ‘Jew’.

At precisely the time that Abraham was advising Fanny to keep music as ‘an ornament’, rather than part of her fundamental being, let alone a profession, he was also taking steps to protect his daughter from his society’s prejudice. Fanny would enter the Protestant church. Abraham wrote to her that Christianity:

 

Contains nothing that can lead you away from what is good, and much that guides you to love, obedience, tolerance, and resignation, even if it offered nothing but the example of its Founder, understood by so few, and followed by still fewer.

 

He powerfully articulates his own humanist belief:

 

I know that there exists in me and in you and in all human beings an everlasting inclination towards all that is good, true and right, and a conscience which warns and guides us when we go astray. I know it, I believe it, I live in this faith, and this is my religion.

 

In 1820, when Fanny was confirmed and gained her middle name Caecelia (fittingly, the patron saint of music), and then two years later when Abraham together with Fanny’s mother, Lea, also converted to Christianity, gaining a second surname, Bartholdy, Abraham clearly believed that full assimilation into German Lutheran culture was possible. One day, not too far off, the tell-tale name of Mendelssohn would lapse, and the family would be known simply as Bartholdy. He was wrong, but his efforts are yet another example of his desire to protect his children, especially his daughters, from a world in which the ‘good, true and right’ were sometimes hard to find.

Although Fanny would be haunted by her fourteen-year-old self in later years, at the time she seemed to accept the path chosen for her. After all, performing often made her sick with anxiety (‘trembling’ led to, in her own mind at least, ‘failure’, such that ‘I could have beaten myself, and all the others, with vexation’), so it may have been no hardship to take a step into the shadows.

She did not, however, stop composing. Her family would have to, and did, constitute her creative environment. Again and again, she would write pieces for a special occasion, as did her brother Felix, who would compose something every year for Fanny’s birthday. Again and again, often in collaboration with her siblings (Felix, four years younger; Rebecka, six years younger; Paul, seven years younger), beautiful presentation scores would be prepared as gifts for family and friends. Mendelssohn family holidays were simply an opportunity to make yet more music, often in rarefied company. Thus, in the summer of 1822, when Fanny was sixteen, the family visited the composer Louis Spohr in Kassel, the capital of the Electorate of Hesse.

Within these elite circles, Fanny gained just as much recognition as her younger brother. Ignaz Moscheles, the Bohemian piano virtuoso, was present at Fanny’s nineteenth birthday celebration on 14 November 1824 and was mesmerized by both the Mendelssohn offspring:

 

This is a family the like of which I have never known. Felix, a boy of fifteen, is a phenomenon. What are all prodigies as compared with him? Gifted children, but nothing else. This Felix Mendelssohn is already a mature artist, and yet but fifteen years old! . . . His elder sister Fanny, also extraordinarily gifted, played by ear, and with admirable precision Fugues and Passacailles by Bach. I think one may well call her a thorough ‘Mus. Doc.’ [guter Musiker].

 

As Hensel’s biographer, Todd, observes, Moscheles signed Fanny’s album with a mark of his most ‘deep esteem’: a ‘conundrum-like duet, condensed onto one line of music notated with a treble clef. To derive the second voice, one turned the page upside down and read the same line of music, now inverted, and fitted with a bass clef.’ In her mid-teens, the challenge of double counterpoint had both exasperated and daunted Fanny, but now it is offered as a badge of her expertise.

Moscheles was not the only visitor. The Mendelssohns could, and did, attract a wide circle of excellent musicians to their house, enabling Fanny to interact with the finest musicians of the day in her very own home. The family’s move, on 18 February 1825, to a vast mansion on Leipzigerstrasse 3, merely served to establish further the protected environment in which Fanny, ‘musical through and through’, could develop. The house was not just an expression of the Mendelssohn’s wealth, but also their intellectual and cultural life. How many Berlin mansions had an eminent scientist using their garden to conduct experiments into the magnetic mapping of the geosphere? And how many eminent scientists could call on a composer such as Felix Mendelssohn to compose a cantata for the opening of an academic conference, as Alexander von Humboldt would do? Beyond Leipzigerstrasse 3, the world was changing, from the development of railways to the sporadic flares of revolution throughout Europe. It was not that Fanny Mendelssohn knew nothing of railways or revolutionaries, since she marvelled that a machine might one day ‘take a person to Dusseldorf in 4 hours. O hypercivilization, when will you reach us?’ and she witnessed an attempt on the French king’s life in Paris which shocked her deeply. But these things had little or no direct impact upon her day-to-day life. Her parents had made sure of that.

Domesticity and marriage were the roles designated for Fanny, but not only would they be enacted in a remarkable setting, Leipzigerstrasse 3, but according to the values of that remarkable family, the Mendelssohns. So, when Wilhelm Hensel, an aspiring painter, fell in love with a teenage Fanny her parents stepped in quickly, protective and demanding as ever. It was not only that an unestablished artist was unsuitable husband material, but also that (so her mother believed) Fanny was ‘very young and Heaven be praised, hitherto has had no concerns, no passion . . . I now have her before me blooming, healthy, happy and free’. Hensel was packed off to Rome, for five years, during which time he might become worthy, and Fanny would remain ‘free’. Wilhelm’s departure prompted passionate musical outpourings on the part of Fanny, a compositional frenzy that continued through 1823, her most prolific year, including thirty-two lieder, many on the theme of separation or loss of lovers, and into 1824, with more ambitious works for the piano, including her Piano Sonata in C minor. Wilhelm in turn, forbidden to write to Fanny, sent her sketches, so it seems that distance and prohibitions merely pushed the couple towards self-expression through their respective art forms.

The real challenge for Wilhelm Hensel was not, however, to be the winning of Fanny Mendelssohn’s affection, but to achieve integration into the rarefied life in Leipzigerstrasse 3. The house, on his return to Berlin in 1828 after some success in Rome, was dominated by the intense, almost febrile, activities of the young Mendelssohns. Fanny and Felix were the primary movers in a year-long and visionary for its time project to perform Bach’s St Matthew’s Passion, but that was only one aspect of life in the house, which saw a steady stream of young men passing through – poets, philosophers, scientists, drawn (or so believed Fanny) by the presence of Felix and her younger sister Rebecka. Fanny somewhat gleefully notes that Eduard Gans, ‘a man of intellect and knowledge’, comes often and ‘has a great friendship for Rebecka, upon whom he has even forced a Greek lesson, in which these two learned persons read Plato’. She goes on to suggest that it ‘stands to reason that gossip will translate this Platonic union into a real one’. Fanny stirs things up further by mentioning ‘Dirichlet, professor of mathematics, a very handsome and amiable man, as full of fun and spirits as a student, and very learned’, who was also, it seemed, interested in Rebecka. Meanwhile, composer Fanny was, much to Hensel’s dismay, setting an awful lot of poetry by Edward Droysen. But it was the closeness between Fanny and Felix that most disconcerted Wilhelm on his return from Rome. He asked himself, and with good reason, whether there was room in Fanny’s life for a husband, when her relationship with her brother was so intense.

Felix and Fanny were long-standing musical intimates. Back in 1821, as she approached her sixteenth birthday, Fanny wrote to her brother, who was away from Berlin being introduced to Goethe: ‘Think of me when I turn 16 . . . Don’t forget that you’re my right hand and my eyesight, and, without you, therefore, I can’t proceed with my music.’ (The letter, full of playful touches, is signed off from ‘Your truest, coughingest Fanny.’) Twelve years later, she would notice how ‘certain small incidents, coincidental and otherwise, recur between us, even across the miles’, and goes on to list the musical coincidences that seem to unite them, wherever they are in the world. Musicologists now recognize that, in strictly musical terms, the relationship was founded on reciprocity, regardless of the social circumstances that meant that Felix operated on a public stage, whilst Fanny remained essentially a private figure. In the words of one contemporary, who met the siblings, there ‘existed between the two a mutual appreciation and affectionate esteem, which were certainly unusual’ (my italics). R. Larry Todd, expert on both brother and sister, sees Felix as almost as dependent upon Fanny as she upon him. That dependency is expressed, musically, in the frequent exchanges of pieces between the siblings, and, even more strikingly, the way in which each responds to the others’ ideas within their music, even to the extent of quoting phrases. The process continued for decades. Todd explains its workings in 1838, when Fanny was composing an etude in G minor. This strikingly virtuosic and dramatic piece opens with a tumultuous fortissimo passage in G minor. There follows a pause, and the work begins again, pianissimo, in a totally unexpected key, B minor. Ranging through dazzling modulations, the work returns to G minor, only to spring another surprise: rushing arpeggiations ‘give way to a reflective interpolated passage that cites material from the first movement of Felix’s Second Piano Concerto, op. 40, composed in 1837 for the Birmingham Music Festival’ and were thus on Fanny’s mind in the summer of 1838. The work ends with a brief elaboration on Felix’s theme, before a return to arpeggiations and a G minor conclusion.

Such an intense musical relationship, the unusual and mutual ‘appreciation and affectionate esteem’ that he noted, certainly gave Wilhelm Hensel pause for thought. He responded with his own vision of creative collaboration with Fanny. On Christmas Day 1828, he presented her with a miniature album in the shape of a heart, into which Fanny would transcribe her compositions, which would then be decorated with Wilhelm’s artwork. It was yet another way for Wilhelm to communicate to Fanny his desire that she continue to be an artist, and that they continue to collaborate.

Two months later, Fanny and Wilhelm were engaged. Droysen remained an object of jealousy for Hensel, to which his fiancée responded by volunteering that she would ‘no longer compose for voice, at least nothing by poets I personally know, certainly least of all Droysen. Instrumental music remains to me; I can confide to it what I will, it is discreet.’ Fanny even claims that she will give up music entirely, since it is fit only for girls, not for married women. Wilhelm’s response was delightfully indicative of the man: the ‘unlimited practice’ of Fanny’s art must remain a fundamental of their relationship.

At around this time, Felix was ostensibly removed from the emotional equation, heading off on a fully funded, three-year Grand Tour in April 1829. But he remained in a portrait, painted by Wilhelm, and described by Fanny:

 

A beautiful keepsake we have of him, his portrait by Hensel, three-quarter life size, the likeness perfect – a truly delightful, amiable picture. He is sitting on a garden bench (the background formed by lilac-bushes in our garden), the right arm reposing on the back of the bench, the left on his knees, with uplifted fingers. The expression of his face and the movement of his hands show that he is composing.

 

This image of Felix became something of an icon for his sister. She had a similar bench made for the garden, life being made to imitate art, and by mid-June Fanny, and her sister Rebecka, were ‘spending hours before the painting, waiting for it to move them’. At the end of the month, Fanny would write to Felix, responding to a new work by him, telling him it was:

 

Really beautiful. How do I arrive at that conclusion? I’ve been alone for two hours, at the piano . . . I get up from the piano, stand in front of your picture, and kiss it, and immerse myself so completely in your presence that I – must write you now. But I’m extremely happy and love you very much. Very much.

 

A similar, unnerving intensity is present in a letter written by Fanny to Felix on the very morning of her marriage. She is looking at the sketch of her brother, produced by Wilhelm, of course, on her desk:

 

I am very composed, dear Felix, and your picture is next to me, but as I write your name again and almost see you in person before my very eyes, I cry, as you do deep inside, but I cry. Actually, I’ve always known that I could never experience anything that would remove you from my memory for even one-tenth of a moment . . . Your love has provided me with a great inner worth, and I will never stop holding myself in high esteem as long as you love me.

 

Whatever the potent emotional cocktail created by her imminent wedding, Fanny married Wilhelm. She even, in a deeply characteristic step, ended up writing the music for the ceremony herself, because Felix, at the last moment, was unable to do so.

In many respects, Fanny’s wedding to Wilhelm Hensel in the Parochial Kirche in Berlin changed very little. She remained at Leipzigerstrasse 3, the newlyweds setting up home in the grounds of the mansion, in the Gartenhaus. No meagre annexe, a sketch from 1851 shows this garden house to be an extensive building, fronted with columns worthy of a small Greek temple, with every detail designed to create, in urban Berlin, the illusion of country life, from the artfully placed shrubs in their pots to a half-glimpsed footstool placed next to a comfortable bench on the porch. It looks a very pleasant place in which to start one’s married life.

Somewhat disconcertingly, Fanny notes, almost prosaically, in her diary that sex was difficult at first, but then much improved. On 6 March 1830, she felt the first stirrings of a baby and then about ten weeks later she was confined to bed. In late May, a delightful letter from Fanny to Felix offers a glimpse of her apparently comfortable life:

 

My little arrangement here is very nice. The blue inkpot is on a small table next to my bed, a splendid sunny rose cutting is nearby, and the balcony doors are open and admitting glorious fresh air for the first time. I munch on strawberries every day, with which [. . .] my very prudent husband spoils me.

 

This domestic idyll (complete with ink, perhaps for composition) masks a much darker reality, of which Fanny herself may well have been unaware. She had been confined to bed because her amniotic sac had ruptured. On 14 June, she went into labour. Two long days later a baby boy was born. No one expected the premature baby to survive, and his mother’s health was precarious. The two men in her life did what they could. Wilhelm sketched the baby as if in doing so he could keep it alive. Felix sent music, wrote about music, to Fanny. Each sketch, each note, communicates their love for wife and sister.

To everyone’s surprise, the baby not only survived, but flourished. He was named Sebastian Ludwig Felix, honouring the composers Bach, Beethoven and, of course, Fanny’s own brother, and a letter to Sebastian’s new uncle, dated just three weeks later, reveals Fanny’s high spirits:

 

The 7 of July. You heard from us directly yesterday. I had an extremely happy day. We ate at Mother’s at noon with Droysen, whose birthday fell on the same day as Hensel’s, just as it did last year . . . I remained in the hall until 9 and it did me a great deal of good . . . Sebastian, whose progress you must follow in great detail, was dressed for the first time today, but not with jacket and boots. Rather, he’s grown into a regular child’s outfit (vulgarly called Stechkissen) from a little package that was bundled up and put into a tiny bed almost too pathetically. I’ve just received permission today to go walking in the garden because the weather is beautiful.

 

Fanny Hensel had become what her father had wished her to be. Abraham, in a letter to his daughter on the occasion of her twenty-third birthday, just months before her marriage, exhorted her to prepare for her ‘real calling’, ‘the state of a housewife’, reminding her, in terms that constituted the foundation stone of family values in the nineteenth century, that women had a difficult task in that they had to be constantly occupied with ‘apparent trifles, the interception of each drop of rain, that it might not evaporate, but be conducted into the right channel, and spread wealth and blessing’. Felix, a couple of months earlier, added his voice to Abraham’s, singing the praises of the angel in the house: ‘live and prosper, get married and be happy, shape your household so – that I shall find you in a beautiful home when I come . . . and remain yourselves, you two, whatever storms may rage outside’. Both men subscribed confidently to the new bourgeois gender ideology that naturalized the placing of women within the domestic realm by insisting on feminine nature.

One thing had changed, however. Frau Hensel may have been allowed to be up and about again, after six weeks of bed rest; she may have been very happy with her ‘chubby, splendid, healthy boy!’ as she wrote to Felix; but Frau Hensel found it very hard to compose. Given the landscape of belief in which she lived and worked, it would not have been suprising if, at this moment, young wife and mother to lay down her pen.

 

And yet, slowly but surely, the composer returned to work, completing a piece for her parents’ wedding anniversary, then her Cholera Cantata during the epidemic of 1831 (a ‘remarkable achievement’, writes Todd, involving over thirty minutes of music, with a taut unified design, and completed three years before Felix Mendelssohn would write his first oratorio), more songs and then an overture, her only large-scale orchestral work, in the spring of 1832.

By the summer of that year, Fanny was well-advanced into her second pregnancy. ‘Bapsen’, as Sebastian was called, had just turned two when she was confined to bed, as she had been two years earlier. This time, there would be no happy ending. As she notes, carefully, in her diary: ‘From the end of September on I was confined to bed rest, and now began a very sad time for me . . . On November 1, I delivered a dead baby girl.’ The studiedly neutral tone of the diary has perplexed some readers. Nancy Reich, more familiar with the gushing Clara Schumann, believes that Hensel is merely ‘recording in her diary because it is the proper thing to do’.

More likely, the apparent detachment is a form of self-protection because the stillbirth hit Fanny Hensel, woman and composer, harder than anything had done before. Months would pass before she engaged with any form of sustained musical activity. Felix tried to encourage her, but it was only in March, some five months into the ‘very sad time’, that there is a glimpse of an appetite for anything other than grief. Predictably, the occasion was a show put on for her parents. Fanny dressed up as none other than J.S. Bach. Felix was Frederick the Great.

Once again, she returned to the old familiar ways. She continued to perform, privately, and to compose, sometimes intensively, despite the impossibility of any formal professional recognition, and she did so alongside all the domestic and familial responsibilities she undertook, apparently with great pleasure. The births, marriages, deaths, pregnancies, illnesses, courtships and journeys (not to mention the need to order the dinner, or sew coloured ribbons into Sebastian’s baby clothes) sometimes disrupted her compositional activity, but never entirely stopped it. She may have only two days to write the music for a celebration of the feast of St Cecilia, Fanny’s own saint, on 22 November 1833; she may be working in ‘such haste that the accompaniment hasn’t been copied yet’; she may need to ensure that her vision of the singer Pauline Decker (a new friend and musical collaborator) in a dress modelled on Raphael’s Caecilia – ‘the two taller girls’ holding music in their hands ‘in the manner of the angels’ in the old paintings – becomes reality; and she may need Wilhelm and his students to put together the ‘entire exhibition’ ‘without the help of a single craftsman’ – but on the night a ‘magical, beautiful’ performance took place, although the unfinished piano part suggests that Fanny had to improvise. The Caecelia music would be heard once, then never again.

The hidden toll paid by Caecilia’s composer can be glimpsed in a handful of almost elegiac phrases in the letters from this period, as if Fanny can only look back, not forward. Writing to Felix, on 27 February 1834, she compares her life now with a past idyll of collaboration:

It’s really quite a different situation from when we used to sit together at home and you would show me a totally new musical idea without telling me its purpose. Then, on the second day, you would have another idea, and on the third day you would undergo the torment of working them out, and I would comfort you when you thought you couldn’t write anything more. And in the end the piece would be completed and I used to feel that I had a share in the work as well. But those lovely times are of course a thing of the past.

 

Elsewhere, Fanny writes, with characteristic self-mockery, that her ‘lengthy things die in their youth of decrepitude’. She even expressed, cautiously, frustration with the way she has to work, and the people with whom she has to work:

 

Recently I’ve been rehearsing and performing a great deal of music. If only once I could have as many rehearsals as I wanted! I really believe I have talent for working out pieces and making the interpretation clear to people. But oh, the dilettantes!

 

Fanny’s reference to ‘the dilettantes’ is absolutely of her time. Musical dilettantes were a feature of ‘Damenmusik’ (‘women’s music’), the phenomenon discovered and more importantly despised by serious journals such as Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. Reviewers gained easy laughs when writing of their ‘feeling of dread’ when faced with yet another composition by a dilettante female, yet more ‘Damenmusik’. Fanny Hensel, understandably, did not wish to be known as a dilettante. She was better than that. But if she was not a dilettante, what was she? A trip to Paris in the summer of 1835 did little to help clarify the matter. Fanny found that she was received as Felix’s sister, rather than in her own right.

These hints of ambivalence, loneliness, even despair, came as Fanny approached her thirtieth birthday, although Felix did not have the eyes to see this. He did note a change in his sister, and expressed concern, but only up to a point:

 

It makes me sad, that since her marriage she can no longer compose as diligently as earlier, for she has composed several things, especially German lieder, which belong to the very best which we possess of lieder; still, it is good on the other hand, that she finds much joy in her domestic concerns, for a woman who neglects them, be it for oil colours, or for rhyme, or for double counterpoint, always calls to mind instinctively the Greek from the femmes savantes [‘learned women’: the phrase is taken from Moliere’s comedy of 1672] and I am afraid of that. This is then, thank God, therefore not the case with my sister, and yet she has, as said, continued her piano playing still with much love and besides has made much progress in it recently.

 

Felix believed that Fanny took great joy in her ‘domestic concerns’, and other letters from this period, lively, even breathless accounts of family life, seem to confirm his view. ‘Seem to confirm’, because, as one historian notes, the Mendelssohns ‘must have been well aware that correspondence from a family such as theirs would very probably, in German nineteenth-century sensibility, one day be considered public property’. As if to prove the point, Fanny’s letters only survive in large numbers because Felix collected his correspondence together in ‘The Green Books’, which were then passed down through the family and eventually made their way to the Bodleian Library in Oxford. How honest were Fanny’s letters, when one considers that many were co-written by numerous family members? No wonder, then, that the letters reveal a woman delightedly immersed in domesticity: ‘Dear Felix, it’s 9am. Sebastian hasn’t gotten washed yet and my menu hasn’t been ordered. I merely wanted to start the letter and instead the quill got carried away.’ For Sebastian’s birthday he received a ‘real live lamb’ from his aunt Rebecka, which Fanny believes is ‘a horse in disguise’. Her ideas, and her quill, rush on again, ending abruptly, since her mother is waiting to continue the letter. And yet even here, Fanny adds two quick, pointed, musical parting shots: ‘Adieu. Who sang your Scena? Malibran [Maria Malibran, the mezzo-soprano] is in Italy.’

Elsewhere in her letters, a simmering anxiety is palpable, as when Fanny was asked by Felix to provide something for a Christmas album for his fiancée, Cécile. She asks her brother to let her know ‘soon exactly what you would like, for there’s always much to do before Christmas. Can I use paper, as I’d prefer, or am I to write directly into the album?’ Her domestic and practical concerns are compounded by her artist’s awareness that Felix himself was composing for the album: ‘my only hope is that you also didn’t choose Feuchte Schwingen . . . otherwise I’ll kill myself’. She is joking, of course, but despite or because of the joke, one senses the strain. Years later, the domestic and musical would continue to entwine, with the events of the winter of 1844 revealing yet again the interplay of music and domestic responsibility. The Hensels had been receiving worrying reports from Florence. Rebecka, Fanny’s sister, and her husband, the mathematician Gustav Dirichlet, who had so admired her sixties years earlier, had not returned to Berlin, first because of Rebecka’s jaundice, then Gustav’s typhoid fever. Now, against doctor’s orders, Rebecka was pregnant. The Hensels rushed to Florence, as far as one could rush anywhere in winter in January 1845, where Fanny nursed Rebecka; Wilhelm, reluctant to leave his wife, nevertheless continued on to Rome in order to find the models necessary for his own work. Rebecka’s baby was due in April, so Fanny ordered clothes to be sent from Berlin, but on 13 February Rebecka went into labour. Apparently, the doctor arrived at the same time as a baby daughter, called, fittingly, Florentina. For the following month, Fanny simply kept things going, managing Rebecka’s household and correspondence, and helping care for her baby girl. Even in the midst of domestic crisis, Fanny (at least in her letters to Felix) never stops being a musician, as a description of her new niece’s crying is used to take a witty swipe at Berlioz, the composer:

 

I intend to lead art, which has strayed much too far from nature, back to its original path, and to this end am studying with great enthusiasm the utterances of my youngest niece as the mood strikes me. A certain degree of confusion and bad craftsmanship predominates, a mezzoforte muttering that promises very interesting effects in its transferral to the orchestra. When Berlioz will have placed the 50 pianos that he considers necessary, I would advise him to place a wet nurse with a nursing child who hasn’t been fed for a few hours next to each. I’m convinced that the public, especially the mothers of the children, would be very moved.

 

In the autumn of 1835, as the months passed, Hensel composed less and less. Then, in November, she stopped writing her diary, possibly prompted to do so by the death of her father that month. For three and a half years, this personal record, such as it is, falls silent. Although Fanny herself, disgusted with her own ‘musical apathy’, would not have concurred, she had achieved a great deal already by this stage of her life, despite the inextricable intertwining of her music with her family relationships and responsibilities. Her own mother could perceive what Fanny could not, that her rigorous rehearsal techniques, her conducting and her accompanying made her daughter ‘truly a rare phenomenon among women’.

Her achievements depended, however, on remaining within the gilded cage of Leipzigerstrasse 3. Only in such a privileged setting could Fanny Hensel create, for example, the magnificent Sonntagsmusiken, the ‘Sunday musical events’ that took place in her very own Gartensaal (Garden Room), the most significant, indeed the only significant, arena for Hensel as composer, conductor and performer. These ‘Sunday musical events’ have been described as Hensel’s ‘salon’ but were actually something rather different, indeed much more ambitious. Predictably, however, the composer’s own accounts of the Sonntagsmusiken are tagged on to a letter to Felix, which proudly announces that she looks after Sebastian herself, having decided not to employ anyone to care for him, and that she walks with him everywhere on errands and visits, during which he delights his mother with his talking. Fanny adds, in a self-deprecating coda to this vision of maternal activity, that she has been ‘making a great deal of music this winter’, that she is ‘extremely happy with it’ and that her ‘Sunday musicales are still brilliant, except for the last one, which had a brilliant lack of cohesiveness’.

Hensel is being modest, possibly disingenuous. From around 1831, she built up the Sonntagsmusiken into ‘much-admired musical events exceeding the scope of the usual forms of sociable gatherings of the time’.* On 21 January 1839, to give just one example, an audience would crowd into the Gartensaal (spilling over into a bedroom in the main residence) to hear a reading of Mozart’s opera La Clemenza di Tito, given by Hensel’s usual soloists, but supplemented by the English star soprano, Clara Novello, newly arrived in Berlin. No wonder that, if a musician or composer came to Berlin, they sought an invitation, not least because Hensel set high standards for audience behaviour, insisting for example on silence during the performance, which was not always a given at the time. Gradually, the concerts edged closer to becoming public events; refreshments began to be served; for a performance of Felix Mendelssohn’s Paulus, a libretto was printed and set out for the three hundred guests; programmes were printed; guests beyond the Mendelssohns’ immediate circle were permitted to attend. Strangers were coming to Leipzigerstrasse 3.

There they witnessed Fanny Hensel, musician, composer and conductor:

 

She seized upon the spirit of the composition and its innermost fibres, which then radiated out most forcefully into the souls of the singers and audience. A sforzando from her small finger affected us like an electric shock, transporting us much further than the wooden tapping of a baton on a music stand. When one saw Fanny Hensel perform a masterpiece, she seemed larger. Her forehead shone, her features were ennobled, and one believed in seeing the most lovely shapes . . . No common feeling could have possessed her; she must have been contemplating and breathing in the realm of the sublime and beautiful. Even her sharp critical judgements shared with close acquaintances were founded on ideals she demanded from art and human character alike – not in impure motives of exclusion, arrogance and resentment. Whoever knew her was convinced that she was as ungrudging as she was unpretentious.

 

These glowing words come from a fellow musician and composer, Johanna Kinke (she who would fall to her death in London in 1858), who understands and appreciates Hensel’s professionalism, her insistence on rehearsals, her preference for working with only expert singers and musicians. Perhaps, as musical celebrities such as Franz Liszt clamoured to attend, ‘this semi-public space, shared with exclusive audiences drawn from the elite of Berlin society’, was indeed the place where ‘Hensel found her own voice as pianist, conductor and composer’. Perhaps.

Her composer’s voice was determined, in content and scope, by the predominantly private nature of her life, which meant that Hensel always composes for private spaces, even when she occasionally writes larger-scale works. She focuses primarily on the solo song and the character piece for piano, the latter undoubtedly the central form of Romantic piano music but, for Fanny Hensel, a central form intended for a circle of family and friends, rather than for the public concert hall. This is not to diminish her achievement. Far from it. In her chosen genres, even when ‘chosen’ implies chosen for her, she is a superb composer and very much her own woman. Her piano works can be, and often are, described as Lied ohne Worte (Songs without Words), a genre popularized in part by her brother who had published six sets of songs without words between 1832 and 1845. Hensel herself, insists that her works are ‘piano lieder’, and she uses the form to probe dark harmonies, to explore complex key relationships, to apply chromaticism with startling intensity and to blur generic boundaries. Her songwriting is equally impressive. Hensel’s setting of a powerful poem by Lenau has been described as the culmination of her lieder making. Dein ist mein herz [Thine is my heart] shows all the ‘subtle craft of her late style – the major minor exchange, the expressive opening up of traditional tonality to new chromatic combinations and relationships, and the delicate interweaving and mirroring of piano and voice, all designed to heighten our appreciation of Lenau’s moving poem’:

 

Thine is my heart, my pain, thine own and all the joys that burst forth . . . The dearest thing I may acquire in songs that abduct my heart is a word to me that they please you, a silent glance that they touch you.

 

The lyrics seem to speak for Fanny’s own desire for acceptance, her offering of her music on the altar of the men in her life.

But once again, through the winter of 1837–38, she found she could not compose. Then even the concerts faltered, this time because of the devastating effect of an outbreak of measles. Rebecka’s new baby, Felix, died. Fanny’s sister was so distraught that she had to be physically restrained in bed. Wilhelm tried to help, sketching images of the dead baby in an attempt to comfort the grieving mother. Fanny took a more practical approach, travelling with her sister in June 1839 to the Pomeranian sea resort of Heringsdorf on the island of Usedom. Rebecka began to recover, whether by the ‘cure’ provided by several weeks of sea bathing or the fact that the sisters spent the days singing Fanny’s a cappella duets.

The emotional trauma of this period galvanized Hensel in some way. Only a month after her nephew Felix’s death, she was composing again, the first of a series of works demonstrating greater and greater ambition, particularly in her writing for piano. There was more to come, for, on 27 August 1839, the Hensel family (together with their cook) set off for a long-desired trip to Italy. Their destination was Rome, but the journey south itself seemed to bring to the surface Fanny’s exuberant, almost fierce, engagement with life and with music. Whether critiquing a performance of Allegri’s legendary Miserere (Fanny’s perfect pitch revealed that the choir ‘began in A minor and progressively lost its pitch in a gradual, unauthorized descent to somewhere between F and G minor’) or throwing herself into the carnival, wearing a veil rather than a mask because of her glasses, she was in her element. She gained an admirer, a young Charles Gounod, thirteen years her junior, who became almost fixated on her, willing and able to learn at her feet about the German musical tradition, and to celebrate and applaud Fanny’s own compositional activity. As Fanny acknowledged, with her usual deadpan irony, she was living in ‘an atmosphere of admiration and homage’. Even in her youth, she writes, ‘I never was made so much of as I have been here, and that this is very pleasant nobody can deny.’

When, where, how and for whom she could compose had been determined for Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel since her early childhood. She had accommodated herself again and again, showing both perseverance and creativity. Now, in Italy, Fanny Hensel found a new freedom, responding directly to the sights of Rome, creating musically demanding works such as Villa Medici or Ponte Molle. Hensel remained careful, however, when writing to others, to maintain the image of the amateur, domestic, feminine, composer:

 

Composing a good deal lately, and have called my piano pieces after the names of my favourite haunts, partly because they really came into my mind at these spots, partly because our pleasant excursions were in my mind while I was writing them. They will form a delightful souvenir, a kind of second diary. But do not imagine that I give these names when playing them in society, they are for home use entirely.

And she still composed the kinds of pieces that she had done since she was a girl, and for the same reasons. In early 1840, she was writing something for her mother’s upcoming birthday on a ‘played-out rattletrap of a piano’. But in a letter to Lea, Fanny knows that something has changed: ‘Do you recognize your daughter, dear mother?’ she asks.

The transformation continued back in Berlin, where Hensel composed a miniature cycle of three interconnected songs that ‘hint at her aspirations to composition on a large scale’ in a year that marked the high point in her career as a writer of song. She also completed Das Jahr, for solo piano, ‘arguably her most impressive accomplishment’, ‘more forward-looking and original than’ her brother Felix’s work, one of the ‘greatest of the unheralded piano suites of the nineteenth century’, writes Hensel’s biographer, and I would wholeheartedly agree. Das Jahr is a powerful, compelling, at times sumptuous, at others pellucid, piece of music, nearly an hour in length. The twelve movements/months, and the austere ‘Epilog’, are ‘interlocked by related musical and extramusical elements and by an overarching key plan’, which Todd compares to the great piano cycles of Robert Schumann. Two of the most striking elements are the use of chorales, testimony to Hensel’s passionate commitment to the music of Bach, and the use of a unifying motif, derived from the haunting, muffled, descending bass octaves with which January starts.

And yet, even with Das Jahr, Hensel deprecated her own talent, minimized her achievement and set it, unthreateningly, within a domestic sphere:

 

Now I’m engaged in another small work [kleine Arbeit] that’s giving me much fun, namely a series of 12 piano pieces meant to depict the months; I’ve already progressed more than half way. When I finish, I’ll make clean copies of the pieces, and they will be provided with vignettes. And so we try to ornament and prettify our lives – that is the advantage of artists, that they can strew such beautifications about, for those nearby to take an interest in.

 

Fanny is rearticulating the creed asserted by her father some twenty years earlier: ‘Music will perhaps become his profession, whilst for you it can and must only be an ornament [Zierde], never the root [Grundbass] of your being and doing’; remain ‘true to these sentiments and to this line of conduct; they are feminine, and only what is truly feminine is an ornament to your sex.’

This creed meant that Das Jahr, like so many of Hensel’s compositions, was created for a particular person and occasion (in this case, Wilhelm Hensel’s birthday); that it would be performed, as ever, in the private setting of the Gartensaal; and that it would only be circulated amongst friends and family. It made an exquisite manuscript: a visitor to Berlin, Sarah Austin, saw a copy in 1842 and was delighted with the ‘series of beautiful pieces for the pianoforte, called after the months’, not least for the accompanying illustrations by Wilhelm:

 

These were written in an album, and at the head of each month was a charming drawing illustrative of it by Professor Hensel. And all this was simple, dignified, free from the ostentation and sensibleries which sometimes throw doubt or discredit on such manifestations. One had always the fullest assurance that Madame Hensel said less rather than more than she felt.

 

The title page of this beautiful score reads ‘Das Jahr. Zwölf Charakterstücke für Fortepiano von Fanny Hensel’ (The Year. Twelve Character Pieces for Piano by Fanny Hensel). The formality suggests that Fanny may have wished to have her masterpiece published. It did not happen.* Instead, her portrait was taken by Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, German-Jewish painter to the rich, famous and cultured, and Fanny Hensel appears as a lady of the leisured classes. What is more, Fanny, who was not conventionally beautiful (she had one shoulder higher than the other, needed to wear glasses at all times and may have been, as a distant relation by marriage wrote, unkindly, ‘indescribably plain’), becomes conventionally pretty. There are no references to music. The portrait does not even show her hands.

 

Composition as feminine ornament, as domestic virtue, as private pleasure: one has to look hard for the moments when Fanny Hensel appears, momentarily, to stray beyond these boundaries, even in her own psyche. And yet, from time to time she does, although almost always followed by an immediate withdrawal from the field. In 1825, for example, approaching her twentieth birthday, the young Fanny Mendelssohn drafted a proposal for a new amateur music society to promote instrumental music lest it ‘disappear in the bad taste of the time, egotism of the organizer, and pandering to the public’. She took the trouble to work it all out, down to the details of fees and lending libraries, but then quickly backed away from controversy in her assertion that the society would need to be run by men because ‘women of private backgrounds shy away from appearing before an audience’. Later, she became closely involved with the Berlin Singakademie’s performance of Felix’s oratorio Paulus, and wrote to her brother:

 

I thought to myself ‘If you were only up there, everything would be fine.’ Lichtenstein sat next to me and heard my sighs. They started ‘Mache dich auf’ at half the right tempo, and then I instinctively called out, ‘My God, it must go twice as fast.’ Lichtenstein invited me to show them the way but told me that Schneider, the music director, had assured them that one cannot be ruled by a metronome marking. Then I assured them that they could be ruled by my word, and they had better do it, for God’s sake.

 

As this anecdote suggests, when Fanny’s acute musical sensibility was in play, then very little would stop her, but these impromptu moments of self-assertion were rare and short-lived. However, in 1836 when she was thirty-one Fanny took a first, if tentative, step towards getting her music printed. She wrote to a family friend, Karl Klingemann, who was interested in publishing her compositions in London:

 

I enclose two pianoforte pieces which I have written since I came home from Dusseldorf.* I leave it to you to say whether they are worth presenting to my unknown young friend, but I must add that it is a pleasure to me to find a public for my little pieces in London, for here I have none at all. Once a year, perhaps, some one will copy a piece of mine, or ask me to play something special – certainly not oftener; and now that Rebecka has left off singing, my songs lie unheeded and unknown. If nobody ever offers an opinion, or takes the slightest interest in one’s productions, one loses in time not only all pleasure in them, but all power of judging their value.

Typically, Fanny backtracks from this somewhat bleak assessment of her life as a composer (‘unheeded’, ‘unknown’, without a ‘public’), and offers a more positive analysis, emphasizing the importance of the family circle. Felix, she reassures Klingemann, was a ‘sufficient public’ for her, even though he is rarely in Berlin:

 

Moreover my own delight in music and Hensel’s sympathy keep me awake still, and I cannot help considering it a sign of talent that I do not give it up, though I can get nobody to take an interest in my efforts. But enough of this uninteresting topic.

 

Felix, Fanny’s ‘sufficient public’ (if only he were around more), has a complex role at this crucial moment in her life. Her composition remained inextricably entwined with her brother’s very existence, reliant on his stimulation, his approval and his response as a fellow composer. The affection of brother and sister, the musical intimacy that so disconcerted Wilhelm Hensel, is articulated in a famous letter in which Fanny seeks to explain to Felix his power over her:

 

I don’t know exactly what Goethe means by the demonic influence [she uses the word Wesen, a presence neither good, nor bad, but powerful] but this much is clear: if it does exist, you exert it over me. I believe that if you seriously suggested that I become a good mathematician, I wouldn’t have any particularly difficulty in doing so, and I could just as easily cease being a musician tomorrow if you thought I wasn’t good at that any longer. Therefore treat me with great care.

 

Knowing full well Felix’s opposition to her publishing, in 1835 Fanny attempted to gain his approval by emphasizing her passive role in the proceedings: ‘In the recent past, I’ve been frequently asked, once again, about publishing something; should I do it?’ Fanny compares herself to the donkey who starved to death because unable to choose between two bales of hay: Felix on the one side, and Wilhelm, who had always supported her desire to publish, on the other. And yet at the same time she describes herself, to Felix, as ‘rather neutral about it’. Her brother, in response, two months later, is unstinting in his praise for her compositions, but writes that he still has his ‘old reservations’ about publishing. Felix was the only voice that counted. Wilhelm Hensel, as ever, was keen for Fanny to publish her work, but as Fanny wrote to Felix, she would ‘comply totally’ with her husband’s wishes in ‘any other matter, yet on this issue alone it’s crucial to have your consent, for without it I might not undertake anything of the kind’. Two years on, even Fanny’s mother Lea supported her, and wrote to Felix to say so, in June 1837:

 

On this occasion permit me to pose a question and request. Shouldn’t she publish a selection of her lieder and piano pieces? For about a year she has written, especially in the latter genre, many really excellent examples, perhaps not without having in mind some ideas from your first few Lieder ohne Worte. All that holds her back is that you have not called upon or encouraged her to do so. Wouldn’t it be reasonable for you to cheer her on and take the opportunity to secure a publisher?

 

Lea’s plea may reflect her concern for her daughter that summer. Fanny had fallen pregnant again in the spring of 1837, as had her sister Rebecka, resulting in both sisters missing Felix’s marriage to Cécile Jeanrenaud on 27 March in Frankfurt, his bride’s home. In Berlin, a day after the wedding, Fanny was confined to bed and ordered to rest although, characteristically, she still managed to complete a piano prelude the same day. Bed rest did not prevent the loss of a second baby. No one thinks to record how far advanced the pregnancy was this time, although a letter from Fanny on 23 December reveals that she knew she was pregnant at that time. She jokes that she would like the wedding to be moved to Leipzig for ‘certain reasons, which modesty prevents my mentioning’, knowing full well that it would take place in Frankfurt. By the end of March, she would therefore have been at least five months into the pregnancy. On 14 April 1837, Felix, well into his honeymoon travels, received news of his sister’s ‘unpleasant accident’. Both he and Cécile acknowledged that the experience must have been ‘very disagreeable for her’, admired the fact that she was ‘well and cheerful’ and hoped that the weather would be kind to her. The entire episode reveals a world in which a miscarriage is ‘unpleasant’ or ‘disagreeable’, and in which Fanny’s modesty and cheerfulness is a given.

If Felix and Cécile believed that better weather, and a bit of sea bathing, would help Fanny, then her mother Lea may have hoped that Fanny would be supported through the miscarriage if she could take her compositions to a wider audience. Felix did not see things in the same way. He wrote privately to his mother, insisting that she keep the contents of the letter secret from Fanny and Wilhelm. He acknowledges that if Fanny decided to publish, then he would support her:

 

But to encourage her to publish I cannot do, since it runs counter to my views and convictions . . . I regard publishing as something serious (it should at least be that) and believe one should do it only if one is willing to appear and remain an author for one’s life. That means a series of works, one after the other; to come forward with just one or two is only to annoy the public . . . Fanny, as I know her, has neither enthusiasm nor calling for authorship; then, too, she is too much a Frau, as is proper, raises Sebastian and cares for her home, and thinks neither of the public nor the musical world, nor even of music, except when she has filled her primary occupation. Allowing her music to appear in print would just stir her up in that, and I can’t get used to the idea even once. Therefore I will not encourage her, please excuse me. But show these words neither to Fanny nor Hensel, who would think ill of me or misunderstand – rather, say nothing about it. If Fanny’s own drive or desire to please Hensel leads her to publish, I’m prepared, as I said, to help her as much as I am able, but to encourage her to do something that I don’t think is right, I cannot do.

 

Even if the explicit contents of this letter were never communicated to Fanny or Wilhelm, it achieved its effect. Although by the end of 1837, Fanny had completed eleven piano pieces, nothing appeared in print. It was during that winter that she found it so hard to compose.

Five years passed, and there was still no movement. Lea’s death in 1842 not only deprived Fanny of her mother, but also of a supporter of her tentative steps towards a public identity. The following year, 1843, Fanny recovered enough to revive the Sonntagsmusiken in the autumn. She also arranged to have an album of her piano music prepared by a copyist, as a gift for Felix. It bears the title: ‘Twelve piano pieces by Fanny Hensel, née Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. For Felix 1843.’ Fanny looked through the copyist’s work before sending the album to her brother, adding handwritten corrections such as accidentals, performance indications, dynamics and missing notes. She always did care how her work appeared. She continued to compose, and in new genres; 1843 was the year in which she wrote her only piano sonata, ‘a genre largely off-limits to earlier female composers in northern Germany’, and, in Hensel’s hands, one that makes immense demands upon the performer. In the 1840s, the sonata existed at the boundary of public and private, amateur and professional music making, and was increasingly seen as a testing ground for serious composers and, therefore, simply to write a sonata put Fanny Hensel closer to the border between public and private, amateur and professional, than she had ever been before.

A letter from this time expresses all Fanny’s ambivalence about her own status. The figure of the dilettante continues to haunt her:

 

A dilettante is already an alarming being, a female author even more so, but when the two entities are combined in a single person, she becomes the most frightening creature imaginable.

 

This may be irony (Fanny Hensel’s reputation put her far above the female dilettantes she herself despised), but it hints at very real fears on the composer’s part. After all, she knew only too well how her work was judged, even when not in print. A fellow composer such as Niels Gade might sing her praises as a performer (she is ‘utterly excellent’) and as composer (he was ‘completely transported’ by her music, and even acknowledges that Fanny might well have influenced her famous brother, if only because she was the elder of the two), but he is compelled to add a caveat: Hensel’s compositions were ‘for a lady . . . really very pretty’.

Still nothing was done. Fanny continued to compose, continued to send delightful letters to her brother, continued to relish her son’s antics. She noted, with dismay, a worsening of the political situation in 1844: the ‘daily prohibitions, the scribbling and grinding of the government and police from all sides’. Prussia must be in a bad way, she wrote:

If it is really in danger the moment three students form themselves into a union, or three professors publish a periodical! The never-ending prohibitions, the meddling with everything, the constant espionage, carried on in the midst of peace and in spite of the quiet disposition of the nation, has now reached a climax which is perfectly intolerable.

 

Berlin’s fault lines were only too visible. In the Hensels’ part of the city the wide streets were lined with impressive mansions, and the spacious squares housed the buildings that announced Prussia’s power. Yet, from these streets and squares, the Berlin haute bourgeois could see, and smell, the smoke from the furnaces of the iron foundries in Oranienburg, the ‘land of fire’ that would transform Prussia’s, and then Germany’s, economy and landscape. Beyond the city, the harvests failed in 1845 and 1846. The year the engineering company Siemens was founded, 1847, began with food riots: the people were starving. Felix at least could escape: a combination of the generally worsening political situation in Prussia, and the composer’s utter frustration with the nation’s king as a patron, drove Fanny’s brother away from Berlin again.

The spring of 1846 at last brought change, when Fanny Hensel made a new friend, Robert von Keudall, a talented pianist and philosophy student, and a future amanuensis and confidante of Otto von Bismarck. Fanny was delighted with Robert, who was nine years her junior, a ‘lively and charming man’, with ‘such an ear for music as I have not met with since Gounod and Dugasseau’. Soon Robert was visiting every day, exploring actively the huge array of compositions that Fanny had produced over the years. For him, she started to work on a collection of fifty-one works, some old, some new divided precisely into three genres: piano pieces, lieder and part-songs. Todd, Hensel biographer describes this ‘methodology concentration’ as almost ‘Schumannesque’. As Fanny wrote in July 1846: ‘Keudell keeps my music alive and in constant activity, as Gounod did once. He takes an intense interest in everything that I write, and calls my attention to any shortcomings, being generally in the right too.’

Suddenly, Fanny had the confidence to assert herself and, on 9 July 1846, she wrote a remarkable letter to Felix:

 

Actually I wouldn’t expect you to read this rubbish now, busy as you are, if I didn’t have to tell you something. But since I know right from the start that you won’t approve, it’s a bit awkward to get under way. So laugh at me or not, as you wish: I’m afraid of my brothers at age 40, as I was of Father at age 14 or more aptly expressed, desirous of pleasing you and everyone I’ve loved throughout my life. And when I know now in advance that it won’t be the case, I thus feel RATHER uncomfortable. In a word, I’m beginning to publish. I have Herr Bock’s sincere offer for my lieder and have finally turned a receptive ear to his favourable terms. And if I’ve done it of my own free will and cannot blame anyone in my family if aggravation results from it (friends and acquaintances have indeed been urging me for a long time), then I can console myself, on the other hand with the knowledge that I in no way sought out or induced the type of musical reputation that might have elicited such offers. I hope I won’t disgrace all of you through my publishing, as I’m no femme libre and unfortunately not even an adherent of the Young Germany movement. I trust you will in no way be bothered by it, since, as you can see, I’ve proceeded completely on my own in order to spare you any possible unpleasant moments, and I hope you won’t think badly of me. If it succeeds – that is, if the pieces are well liked and I receive additional offers – I know it will be a great stimulus to me, something I’ve always needed in order to create. If not, I’ll be as indifferent as I’ve always been and not be upset, and then if I work less or stop completely, nothing will have been lost by that either.

 

What is particularly compelling about Fanny’s words here is her consciousness, barely articulated but nevertheless present, that she remains, on one level, the fearful fourteen-year-old girl who had been forbidden to have a professional career.

Felix did not reply at once, which ‘somewhat hurt’ Fanny. In the meantime, she received further offers from publishers, noting with her usual irony that they were offers ‘that no female dilettante has probably yet received’. And still Felix did not respond. At last, four weeks later, he wrote to his ‘dearest Fenchel’, apologizing for his silence. His letter is short, and to the point. He offers his sister his ‘professional blessing [Handwerkssegen] on your decision to join our guild’, and hopes that she will experience only the joys of public life: ‘may the public pelt you only with roses and never with sand.’ Felix signs off: ‘The fellow journeyman tailor, FMB.’ There is a conscious echo of the moment back in 1824 when Felix had been symbolically welcomed, with the full blessing of his family, into the brotherhood of Mozart, Haydn and ‘old father’ Bach. He had been fifteen years old, suggesting that, just as Fanny was haunted by her teenage self, so perhaps was Felix. Only now could the siblings acknowledge, obliquely, the legacy of the decisions made for them decades earlier. Felix’s response was not ideal, but it would do: ‘At last Felix has written, and given me his professional blessing in his kindest manner. I know that he is not quite satisfied in his heart of hearts, but I am glad he has said a kind word to me about it.’

Now, the floodgates opened after those decades of containment: 1846 was ‘a creatively explosive, prolific year for Fanny – arguably her annus mirabilis’, writes her biographer. She ‘committed to composing on a regular basis and all that it entailed – to winnowing, revising, and polishing works, and for the first time began to see her music through the press on a sustained, regular schedule’. Keudall provided her with critical advice throughout. To a family friend, she was careful to emphasize her passive role in the business and her willingness to let it drop if needs be:

 

In addition, I can truthfully say that I let it happen more than made it happen, and it is this in particular that cheers me . . . If they want more from me, it should act as a stimulus to achieve, if possible, more. If the matter comes to an end then, I also won’t grieve, for I’m not ambitious, and so I haven’t yet had the occasion to regret my decision.

 

She was equally careful in her handling of Felix, and with good reason. According to his wife, Cécile, his response to Fanny’s opus 1 was somewhat melodramatic. He sang all the songs, ‘and continually swore in between that he wanted to avenge himself’. Cécile goes on, probably tongue-in-cheek, to describe Felix as ‘egotistical’, and suggests that his previous opposition was driven by his desire ‘to begrudge the world something so beautiful’. Although Fanny had apparently been happy to communicate with her brother directly about the publication of works that he knew well (his ‘old friends’), her opus 1 and opus 2, she took care to write to Cécile about opus 3, which contained new material, and admitted to a ‘guilty conscience’ that she was making public works with which Felix had not been directly involved.

Fanny’s ‘conscience’ did not, however, prevent her compiling, when asked by publishers, a list of her compositions that were still ‘floating around the world concealed’. Three more collections headed for the presses. The year ended with the writing of a piano trio, conceived (as so many previous works had been) as a birthday present for a family member, in this case, Rebecka. The Piano Trio’s first movement begins in suppressed tension, and builds to a powerful close. The second movement runs seamlessly into the third, which is marked Lied, linking it clearly with her earlier Songs for piano. The writing for the piano is fascinating, giving great freedom to the performer whose part, in the final movement, is marked ad libitum. As an album note puts it, the music ‘drives to a grand climax as the strings, once again set two octaves apart, soar high above the tremolandi piano, and the trio powers its way to a resounding close in D major’. In her diary, in May 1846, Fanny Hensel wrote ‘I feel as if newly born.’

She was only too well aware how long this moment had taken to arrive:

 

I cannot deny that the joy in publishing my music has also elevated my positive mood. So far, touch wood, I have not had unpleasant experiences, and it is truly stimulating to experience this type of success first at an age by which it has usually ended for women, if indeed they ever experience it.

 

The wonder is heightened by a sense of the time that has passed: ‘To be sure, when I consider that 10 years ago I thought it too late and now is the latest possible time, the situation seems rather ridiculous, as does my long-standing outrage at the idea of starting op. 1 in my old age.’ Fanny is, of course, being ironic about her ‘old age’. She was only forty, and feeling good on it, noting in August 1846 that ‘the indescribable feeling of well-being, which I have had this entire summer, still continues’.

Fanny understood that her belated public emergence had come late. What she did not know is that it would be so short-lived. By the spring of 1847, she was once again unsure of her way as a composer, and it seemed that the world around her was also in crisis. The political situation in Prussia was becoming increasingly tense, with the desperate and hungry protesting on the streets in Berlin in April. Fanny expressed sympathy with the plight of her poor countrymen, but also noted, wearily, ‘now politics will dominate the next time period; everything else will be impossible’. She herself was ‘having a dreadful time; nothing musical is succeeding for me – since my trio I have not written a single usable bar’. The trio did, however, have its first performance towards the end of April.

Hensel would in fact write a song over the next couple of weeks, completing it on Friday 13 May, seventeen days after writing that ‘nothing musical’ was succeeding for her. On Saturday, she was working with her chorus on rehearsals for the following day’s Sonntagsmusiken, and she lost sensation in her hands. This was not a new experience. In the months after her mother’s death, in December 1842, Fanny had noticed certain worrying physical symptoms, including a lack of sensation in her arms, but by the autumn of 1843 she believed that she was managing the symptoms with a cure very much of her time:

 

The numbness has almost disappeared, and the weakness comes and goes by fits. Galvanism did not suit me, and I am now trying bathing them in a decoction of brandy, which prescription has acquainted me with the interesting fact that in Berlin, where every third shop sells schnapps, there is no distillery, and I shall have to see where I can get the stuff. I played very well here the other day, but the next, at Mme Decker’s, worse than any night-watchman – in a word, I can no more depend upon myself now than I could at fourteen, and it is hard to become incapable before I have reversed those figures.

Again, for Fanny, that age, fourteen, becomes the symbol of her own fragility and fear, the young girl inside the mature woman. And yet although she could not ‘depend upon’ herself, she continued to work, composing, directing, seeing her work into publication, her schnapps at the ready. When she experienced her symptoms again on 14 May, she told the chorus to continue (‘May is Laughing’), and went into the next room to treat her hands. Someone heard her say ‘How beautiful it sounds.’ Another believed she said ‘just like mother’s’ as she collapsed. Fanny had always believed that she would die like Lea, and she was right, for the tell-tale symptoms of the previous years had finally coalesced into a major stroke. By the time her brother Paul arrived some forty-five minutes later, she was unconscious. Fanny Hensel died before 11pm that evening.

 

Felix, when told, screams, falls to the floor, faints and ruptures a cranial vessel. Wilhelm sketches his beloved wife on her death bed (‘one of his best likenesses’ but ‘the hardest task he ever fulfilled’) and then retreats into grief, never fully recovering. He cannot find words to express his loss, only drawings, and not many of those. He can only say: ‘Her life was truth; her end, blessed.’ Fanny is buried in the cemetery of the Lutheran Holy Trinity Church where two lines of music, a phrase from her final song, Bergeslust, are inscribed on her tombstone, honoured, in death, as a composer first and foremost by this most loyal of husbands. Felix dies six months later on 4 November, also of a stroke. Thousands follow his coffin, first in Leipzig, and then in Berlin, where he is buried next to his sister. The tombstones of Abraham and Lea stand only a few metres away.

In the days following her mother’s death, as she sorted through Lea’s papers, Fanny had pondered her own mortality in her diary:

 

Who of my beloved will one day read these lines? May they read everything, and may I, as the eldest, also be the first, and may my dear husband and Sebastian stand by me when I depart this life, though I still would like to have a bit more time.

 

Her request for a ‘bit more time’ is heartbreaking in the light of her death at forty-one. Yet it is not only her own death that she is considering here, but her posterity. Fanny Hensel’s question as to who ‘will one day read these lines’ can be asked of her compositions. Who would hear them? Not many people, is the short answer. Fanny Hensel’s work would quickly disappear from public view. Only now is the painstaking work of scholars, in the archives in Germany and elsewhere, unearthing the sheer scale and quality of her achievement as a composer. Only now can Fanny Hensel’s music, silenced for so long, be heard by those with ears to listen.

Berlin today shows little interest in commemorating Fanny Hensel. She can still be seen, however, in an unlikely place (the British Royal Collection) and in a surprising guise (as the prophetess Miriam, sister of Moses). It was Wilhelm Hensel, of course, who allows us to see his wife as a musician. He was the man who encouraged Fanny every step of the way in her quest to compose, who wanted her to publish, and who could not bear her loss. Wilhelm used Fanny as his model for Miriam in his large canvas called Song of Praise, which he proudly took to London to show the newly crowned Queen Victoria. She in turn was delighted with the picture, but did not wish to offend British artists by buying a Prussian’s work. Wilhelm bided his time, and a few years later presented the work as a gift to the queen. In return, Victoria gave him jewels for his own real-life ‘Miriam’. Fanny, back in Berlin, was somewhat embarrassed: when would she wear the things? She may also, somewhere, have been uncomfortable with her representation as Jewish Miriam, the older sister of Aaron and Moses. After all, she was only recently assimilated, still the sister of ‘jewboy’ Felix. To me, there is something fitting about Fanny being memorialized as Miriam, whose song, ‘Sing unto G-d, for He has triumphed greatly; horse and rider He cast into the sea’, noted in Exodus 15:20, is an archetypal moment when a woman emerges from the shadows, shakes her timbrel and, for a moment, leads the music.

The forgetting of Fanny Hensel sometimes had very little to do with gender. Revolution came to Prussia in 1848, and the previous decades were lost to sight in the political struggles that followed. A handful of Hensel’s works, including the Piano Trio, opus 11, were published in 1850, but Fanny’s moment had well and truly passed. In the twentieth century, even if anyone had shown interest in Felix’s sister, the Nazis sought to wipe the Jew Mendelssohns off the German cultural map.

On the other hand, the forgetting of Fanny Hensel had everything to do with her gender. At the time of her death, reviewers, faced with her posthumous publications, kept their comments short, dwelling primarily upon Fanny’s stylistic dependence upon Felix, and unable to look past their own ideas of what a woman was capable of composing. Hensel’s lieder may not ‘betray a woman’s hand’, they may even suggest an ‘artistic study of masculine seriousness’ but nevertheless, all but one ‘lack either a commanding individual idea, or else clear phrasing’. Another critic admired ‘all the outward aspect; yet we are not gripped by the inner aspect, for we miss that feeling which originates in the depths of the soul and which, when sincere, penetrates the listener’s mind and becomes a conviction’. And yet another, praising the ‘gracious, pleasant element’ still felt a lack of ‘powerful feeling drawn from deep conviction’.

These kinds of comments mark a subtle, but devastating, shift in the way in which the work of women composers was understood between the era of Martines and that of Hensel. The compositions of Martines and her predecessors were certainly understood in terms of the composer’s sex, but it was deemed remarkable, exceptional, sometimes even admirable and useful to the powers that be, for a woman to produce such fine music. A woman composer would have to take care that she was properly feminine, according to the values of her society, but the music she composed was not in itself deemed feminine.

By the 1840s, if not before, and fuelled by the increasing institutional and academic study of music, beliefs about ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ music changed the way in which a woman’s composition was heard. If a woman attempted to compose in a masculine way, all that happened is that she betrayed herself as a woman even more clearly. The understanding and evaluation of the male body and mind as stronger than, and more intellectual than, that of woman generated a hierarchy of musical structures and forms, with large-scale instrumental compositions at the top and small-scale songs at the bottom. Women were expected to write, and did write, in genres with which they were associated, particularly songs and piano pieces, genres that reflected the stereotypical ideals of femininity, pieces that were gentle, undemanding and simple, directly emotional rather than complex and intellectual. It was not just the critics who believed they could detect the sex of the composer in his, or her, music. Clara Schumann, a late addition to the Hensel circle, and the recipient of Fanny’s kindness, subscribed to the view as well, admiring Fanny Hensel as a person, despite her ‘rather brusque manner’, but doubting her ability as a composer because women ‘always betray themselves in their compositions’.*

Fanny Hensel spent her life as a composer working within a musical establishment that believed in, and policed increasingly effectively, the boundaries of masculine and feminine music, dictating which forms could and should be approached by women (songs, yes; symphonies, no) and her achievement as a composer would be judged by its standards for centuries after. For it was Fanny Hensel’s misfortune to be living in, indeed assimilated into, a Protestant, German haute bourgeoisie whose values would come to dominate the Western classical music tradition in the nineteenth century, from Central Europe to North America. At first sight, previous eras’ insistence on silence, or the equation of composition with prostitution, seem long gone, replaced by a more benign vision of the female musician as a domestic goddess, her creativity confined to the home – an accompaniment, literally and metaphorically, to family life. The idea would prove to be a poisoned chalice. Just as women composers began to escape the shadow of the courtesan, the new challenge would be to gain access to the great, new and, crucially, public arenas for classical music, the opera houses and concert halls of Europe and North America. For Hensel’s successors, even now, this remains the final frontier.

 

 

 

* R. Larry Todd, author of the fascinating The Other Mendelssohn, upon which I draw heavily in this chapter, explains double counterpoint. The student sets, against a given melodic line, such as a pre-existent chorale melody, a second, newly devised part, conceived so that the two can be ‘inverted’, or flipped (i.e. with one part transposed an octave above or below the other), without infringing the rules of voice leading and dissonance treatment. It is a hard discipline, as Fanny found. One of her early attempts, in her mid-teens, includes the exasperated note, ‘O du schlecter Kontrapunkt’ (O, you wretched counterpoint).

 

* The Sonntagsmusiken continued something of a tradition in Fanny’s mother’s family. Her great-aunt Cäcilie was instrumental in the founding of a Viennese concert society, the significant Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, but it was great-aunt Fanny von Arnstein who presided over an illustrious salon. During the Congress of Vienna, her guests included Wellington and Talleyrand, as well as literary and artistic celebrities. When Fanny von Arnstein, resolutely Prussian despite living in Vienna, died in 1818, her niece Lea remembered her as ‘the most interesting woman in Europe, a miraculous phenomenon in our stupid, egoistic times’.

 

* The work was unearthed by scholars in 1993, with a full-colour facsimile appearing in 2000.

 

* It has been suggested that the two pieces being offered to Klingemann, to be shown to a publisher in London, were Hensel’s scintillating Prestissimo in C major and a passionate Allegro agitato in G minor.

 

* Fanny, meanwhile, did not think much of Clara’s husband’s work, writing that she could not ‘acquire a taste for this Schumann’, but she did not ascribe her dislike to his gender.