An important first stab at the life and works of an
underappreciated musical talent. Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel (1805-47)
was four years older than her brother Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy,
the so-called "gentle genius" of German musical Romanticism. As we
are learning from the proliferation of her music on CD, she was his
peer in natural musical ability. Since they were direct descendants
of a seminal figure of the German Enlightenment, the Jewish
philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, you might have expected that such a
pair of sibling prodigies would be equally nurtured. You would be
wrong. While the family, particularly their father, could see that
Felix was destined to be a famous composer and conductor, they only
envisioned Fanny as a good housewife. Felix himself, apparently
motivated by some competitive jealousy, arguably aided and abetted
this parochial view. Fortunately for posterity, Fanny refused to
play a neat role in this misogynist fable as either victim or
escapee. She kept on composing and staging important private
musical salons, supported and encouraged by her husband, the
portrait painter Wilhelm Hensel. By the end of her too-short life
she was starting to receive some belated public recognition. How
much did her unique family situation make, retard, or actually
unmake her gifts? Did her marriage to Hensel ironically act as the
agent whereby Fanny acquired a "room of her own"? This book
provides basic material to set about considering those questions.
If there were already two or three standard lives of Fanny
Mendelssohn, it would be easy to carp about certain aspects of the
present volume, including the less than scintillating prose style;
but in the circumstances, it would be simply unfair. (But a second
edition should add a CD discography to the work list.) It will take
still further scholarship and extended reflection by additional
biographers to give us Fanny Mendelssohn in depth, but this is a
worthy start. (Kirkus Reviews)
Fanny Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1805-1847), like her younger brother
Felix, demonstrated prodigious musical talent as a child. In their
youth, Fanny and Felix were inseparable friends; they encouraged
each other, collaborated in musical endeavors, and received the
same education and training from distinguished tutors. But as an
adolescent, Fanny was told by her father that her role as a woman
was to concern herself with her home and that music could be only
secondary, even though she had become a remarkable pianist and
composer. She married Wilhelm Hensel, a respected portrait painter
who encouraged her musical talents. Fulfilling her domestic role as
wife and as mother of their son, Sebastian, she continued to
compose - principally lieder - and to organize concerts in her home
that became an integral part of the Berlin musical scene. Her
talents were warmly received during a journey to Italy,
particularly by Gounod, who heard her play from memory the music of
Bach, Beethoven, and Mendelssohn. At forty years of age Fanny
finally went against the orders of her father and of Felix and
published her compositions. She had just begun to receive critical
praise when she died suddenly at the age of forty-two. Her death
was a devastating blow to Felix, who survived her by barely six
months. This book, originally published in French in 1992, is the
first and only authoritative biography of Fanny Mendelssohn and
contains a complete list of her published compositions. Set against
the backdrop of a privileged life in Berlin in the early nineteenth
century, Francoise Tillard's vivid portrait describes an
exceptional artist - she left behind four hundred works - who could
have held her own among thegreatest if she had not been prohibited
from venturing into the professional world.
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