Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel (1805 – 1847): Oratorium nach Bildern der Bibel
If you ever wanted to make a powerful study of gender inequality in 19th century music – and its practical and psychological effects on talented, creative women – then Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel would be a pretty good place to start.
By dint of living under the shadow of a very famous brother, her own music was largely hidden from view during her lifetime. In the 175 years since her death, its ensuing neglect has been almost criminal.
In her youth, Fanny was regarded by several fine judges as just as talented as her brother Felix. Having shared an impressively diverse education, both musical and otherwise, the young Mendelssohn siblings were nothing less than spiritual and musical soulmates.
And yet when they reached adulthood, it was as if an iron curtain suddenly dropped down between them. The many doors which now opened up to Felix were just as promptly shut in Fanny’s face. While Felix went out into the world to show off his extraordinary abilities, his equally talented sister was left to languish at home and to learn the profession of being a good housewife instead.
Not only did their father Abraham forbid Fanny to pursue music as a profession, but her brother would soon adopt the same position and repeatedly discourage her from performing publicly or from publishing her own compositions. Father and son both agreed that the professional music world was no place for a woman, not least a woman of Fanny’s social class.
Fanny might have rebelled more against these absurd constraints, but she loved her family and didn’t care to displease them. And yet dutifully submitting to their demands would stifle an important part of her identity. It would also leave lasting scars on her self-confidence.
She still composed prolifically, making time to write almost every day. As she could not expect to have her works performed outside of the family home, much of her output would consist of songs (lieder) and piano music. Even with these, her originality of thought and the quality of her craftsmanship were striking. She would create a new type of piano miniature, known as Lieder ohne Worte (Songs without Words). Although it was a musical genre that her brother would then develop and become famous for, the evidence now strongly suggests that it was Fanny who invented the form.
Sometimes Fanny would try her hand at more substantial works – cantatas, orchestral overtures and chamber music – and positively excel, showing an instinctive grasp of instrumental colour, for dramatic narratives and for handling large-scale structures. It is these works that particularly hold their own against those of her brother. Although Felix’s mature music was more technically polished, Fanny’s would more than equal him in terms of imaginative power and expressive range, and sometimes even surpass him.
It was only in early middle age that Fanny would finally pluck up the courage to go against her family’s wishes and publish some of her own music. Tragically, a sudden and catastrophic stroke would take her life aged just 41, just when she was at last starting to find her rightful place in the world.
But even as Fanny Mendelssohn would suffer this measure of injustice as a composer, it would be wrong to say that she was entirely unappreciated in her lifetime. Certain family members, such as her mother, had always foreseen great things for her. Fanny had managed to impress her mother from the moment her eyes had first seen light of day. “Look, she has Bach fugue playing fingers!” Lea Mendelssohn had exclaimed eagerly of her new-born. She would remain a great confidante and supporter of her daughter throughout her life.
Although born in Hamburg, Fanny would move to Berlin with her family when she was seven and spend the rest of her life there. By the age of 13, she was already fulfilling her mother’s prophecy, and becoming something of an authority on the (still unfashionable) music of JS Bach. As a birthday present to her father, she would perform, from memory, 24 Preludes from Bach’s Das Wohltemperierte Klavier, and she was soon playing the most complex fugues from Bach’s collection with much the same assurance.
When she and Felix later took lessons from Carl Friedrich Zelter, the well-connected director of the Berlin Singakademie, the latter immediately observed of Fanny, “this child really is something special.” Zelter’s later praise for Fanny would confirm only too well the misogynistic culture of the time: “she plays as well as any man.”
From quite early on, Fanny was already taking something of a protective role towards her gifted younger brother. When the 12-year-old Felix went to visit Goethe with Zelter, Fanny plied him with good-humoured, motherly advice in her letters: “How is your present Minerva* – your Professor Mentor – satisfied with you? I hope (to put it like a tutor) that you acquit yourself reasonably and do honour to the training given by your House-minerva… keep your eyes open and prick up your ears, and if you don’t relate every detail to me afterwards I will consider us ex-friends. Please don’t forget to sketch his [Goethe’s] house, for I would like that…” But even at that stage, it may have seemed strange to Fanny that she had not been invited to go there with him.
*Minerva was Felix’s nickname for his sister, after the Roman goddess of wisdom.
Felix would have been the first to acknowledge Fanny as his “Professor Mentor” and that in his early years he never wrote anything without her input and advice. Looking back at their youth some years later, Fanny would tell him that she had always “immediately found out about every thought that passed through your head, and knew your latest pieces by heart before you wrote them down …. Because of our common musical pursuits our relationship was certainly rare between siblings.”
But Felix’s dependency on Fanny would soon be turned on its head. As their paths sharply diverged in their late teens, and Fanny’s musical horizons were dramatically reduced, she would develop something of an emotional over-reliance on her brother, continually looking to him for the encouragement and affirmation that she felt she had lost.
The imbalances in their relationship had started at around the time when Felix had first been invited on several European tours by Zelter, at which he had of course greatly excelled. Even while still in his teens, his career was taking off at a spectacular rate. But given how comparably well she would have done had she only been afforded the same opportunities, we can only wonder at how Fanny must have felt. Finding herself instead stranded at home, her frustrations eventually got the better of her and she complained about the situation to her father Abraham.
His response was implacable and all too typical of the time. Of Felix, he told her:
Music will perhaps become his profession, while for you it can and must only be an ornament, never the root of your being and doing. We may therefore pardon him some ambition and desire to be acknowledged in a pursuit which appears very important to him, because he feels a vocation for it, while it does you credit that you have always shown yourself good and sensible in these matters; and your very joy at the praise he earns proves that you might, in his place, have merited equal approval. 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.
When Abraham noticed his daughter still wavering over the matter a year or so later, he drove home his point more forcibly: “you must become more steady and collected, and prepare more earnestly and eagerly for your real calling, the only calling of a young woman – I mean the state of a housewife.”
Perhaps such advice was less shocking coming from a conservative and religious-minded parent, and Fanny might still have been able to break free from it in time. But when her beloved Felix would come to take much the same line as his father, particularly upholding it after their Abraham’s death in 1835, it would leave a far deeper impact on her.
Fanny always tried to adapt to the strictures in her life as gracefully and good-humouredly as she could. And at least her creative efforts remained unaffected as she composed as prolifically as before. Felix, as it happens, would be so impressed by some of her lieder from the late 1820s that he had them printed in a collection of his own, though solely under his name*.
*This would lead to an awkward incident many years later when Felix met the young Queen Victoria, who expressed an interest in singing one of Felix’s songs which she particularly liked: Italien. Slightly red-faced, Felix had to admit the song in question had been written by his sister.
Despite the subterfuge in Felix’s collection, the identity of Fanny’s songs was not kept a complete secret in musical circles. John Thomson, writing for the British Harmonican journal, would praise Fanny’s contributions, stating that “she is no superficial musician; she has studied the science deeply and writes with the freedom of a master. Her songs are distinguished by tenderness, warmth and originality: some of which I heard were exquisite.”
And although he could not overcome his blind spot over her gender-role, Felix never stopped appreciating his sister’s musical gifts. After she had sent him some newly composed lieder in 1829, he was almost overcome with emotion having played them through: “I think it’s the loveliest music that a person on earth can create”, he told her. “Nothing has ever enlivened and gripped me, at any rate, so totally… [I] did crazy things in my room, and hit the table, and may also have cried a lot… That is the heart, the very heart of music. And if I start to play the ending, I have to sing them all, for none is weak. I can never stop…” Felix would end poignantly, “I’ll never create anything like it in my life.”
Perhaps such words helped to keep Fanny’s creative aspirations alive. But there were other ways in which she could help herself. Not least, she could find herself a spouse who would support her in a way neither her father nor brother could.
She first met her future husband, a dashing former soldier turned painter named Wilhelm Hensel, in around 1823, when she was 18 and Wilhelm 29. Initially her family disapproved of the courtship (Wilhelm was from a slightly lower social class and – shock and horror – had Catholic relatives). But even the Mendelssohns could accept the young man had other things going for him – he was already a painter at the Prussian royal court and when the king awarded the young man a fellowship to study in Rome for five years, Fanny’s parents stipulated that if she still felt the same way about him on his return, then she could marry him. She did, and marrying Hensel would turn out to be one of the best decisions she ever made.
Far from expecting her to devote all her time to wifely duties, Wilhelm had already made it a pre-condition of their union that she must have unlimited access to her music. Before heading off to his painting studio each morning, Wilhelm would set out music paper and writing materials on his wife’s desk and encourage her to compose something before dinner time. Unlike Abraham and Felix, Wilhelm always urged his wife to publish her music. Sadly, Fanny’s strong loyalties to both her brother and father had left her head addled over the whole issue, and it would be many years before she took up her husband’s advice.
Wilhelm could be a source of inspiration in other ways. The two would often collaborate of artistic projects, one of their most celebrated being Fanny’s cycle of 12 piano pieces depicting the months of the year (Das Jahr). She wrote the music on tinted paper, besides fragments of poetry, to which her husband then added beautiful illustrations.
Fanny’s husband also used her as a model for several of his works, most famously casting her as Miriam in his biblical painting Miriam’s Song of Praise (left). Fanny would wryly comment on her husband’s habit of placing a wreath upon her head in her portraits “which will lead people to believe that I was born with such a contraption.”
It was also not long after their marriage that Fanny realized that she could still achieve something as a musician on a more domestic level. In 1831, she revived an old family tradition of private concerts, with a series she called the Sonntagmusiken (Sunday music), held in the Mendelssohns’ spacious Berlin residence near the Tiergarten. She set the programmes herself, played the piano, organized her own choir and conducted. Most importantly, the concerts allowed her plenty of scope to perform her own music.
Private these events may have been, but they were far from parochial. Her guest-list would be full of distinguished names such as Franz Liszt, Niccolò Paganini, Clara and Robert Schumann, the young French composer Charles Gonoud and the German poet, Heinrich Heine. While the guests listened in rapt silence, Wilhelm would often make impromptu sketches of them, or else invite them to sit for their portraits afterwards.
Taking encouragement from her success with the Sonntagsmusiken, Fanny also tried her hand at writing some larger scale works for the first time, which she could then programme into the concerts.
Her Oratorium nach Bildern der Bibel (Oratorio based upon Pictures from the Bible) is the third and largest of three cantatas she wrote in 1831. Fanny left no title on the manuscript of the work beyond that it was dedicated to the victims of a cholera pandemic that had just been sweeping across Europe. Using a selection of verses from Job, Isaiah, Psalms and Revelations (in a manner similar to that of Brahms’ German Requiem written nearly 40 years later), the narrative moves from Old Testament divine wrath (accompanied by terror and cries for help from the people) to a search for repentance and ultimately celestial redemption.
The music takes pre-classical models as its starting point – JS Bach and Handel – but then transforms these into an expressive, early romantic context (in much the way her brother would do with his later oratorios, St Paul and Elijah). Employing an eight-part chorus accompanied by full orchestra (augmented with extra trombones), the music positively fizzes with invention as it races from movement to movement, while its rapidly changing moods are handled with a deft and lithesome touch. In all, one would expect great things to come from any other 26-year-old composer writing a piece as good and as technically assured as this.
But when Fanny showed her brother her three cantatas, he was uncharacteristically critical, nit-picking over details in the orchestration. Could he possibly have felt that Fanny was straying too far into his territory? Whatever the case, his sharp reaction would have a damaging consequence: Fanny wrote no further cantatas – in fact she would write almost no further orchestral works of any kind, despite having demonstrated a clear aptitude for such music.
A similar thing would happen when she wrote a String Quartet in E Flat Major in 1835 – possibly the first string quartet ever written by a woman, and one ranking highly with any other work in the genre at the time. But again, Felix’s reaction was surprisingly negative.
As the years began to pass, Fanny knew that she wanted to write more than just “feminine” lieder and piano salon pieces. Great music was stirring within her. But would she be allowed the time and the opportunity to realize her potential?
Suggestions for Further Listening
Fanny composed two other beautiful, neo-Bachian cantatas in 1831, Lobsegang (Hymn of Praise, written to celebrate the first birthday of her son Sebastian) and Hiob (with texts from the book of Job).
Another important religious work from her youth was her highly original Ostersonate (Easter Sonata) for piano. Written was she was just 23, the piece takes its starting point from the late piano sonatas of Beethoven, while also clearly anticipating the music of Liszt in several passages. The work’s four movements depict the Passion of Christ.
Like so many of Fanny’s unpublished compositions, the sonata was lost for well over a century after her death. When it was finally unearthed in 1970, there was a general assumption among musicologists that it was one of Felix’s compositions – despite the manuscript being in Fanny’s handwriting (with crossings out) and despite her mentioning her work on the piece in several of her letters. It is only since 2010 that the sonata’s authorship has been restored to its rightful sibling.