Some of Felix Mendelssohn's published songs were really written by his sister
Fanny Mendelssohn wrote over 450 works, yet most went unpublished while she lived, and six of her songs appeared under her brother Felix's name. Social rules and family doubts kept her music private until 1846, when she finally published an Opus 1. She died the following year, aged 41.
Born in Hamburg on 14 November 1805, she was the eldest of four children, with Felix arriving four years later. Her father Abraham was the son of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, and her mother Lea Salomon descended from the entrepreneur Daniel Itzig. The children were baptised in 1816, and when Abraham added Bartholdy to the family name to downplay its Jewish roots, Fanny told Felix they all disliked it.
Her talent showed early. Her mother, who may have absorbed Bach's Berlin tradition through the writings of his pupil Johann Kirnberger, gave her first piano lessons, and at 14 she played all 24 preludes of The Well-Tempered Clavier from memory for her father's birthday in 1819. She and Felix studied piano with Ludwig Berger and composition with Carl Friedrich Zelter, who told Goethe in 1816 that the eldest daughter could give him something of Bach. The siblings joined the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin in 1820 and stayed close all their lives.
Her output includes a string quartet, a piano trio, an overture, four cantatas, more than 125 solo piano pieces and over 250 songs. Praised as a pianist, she seldom played in public outside the family. Six songs appeared in Felix's Opus 8 and 9 because of family reservations and expectations about women's roles. In 1829 she married the painter Wilhelm Hensel, who supported her ambitions, and their son Sebastian was born in 1830. She died of a stroke on 14 May 1847.
Scholars have studied her far more closely since the 1990s. Her Easter Sonata was credited to Felix in 1970 until new documentary analysis in 2010 restored it to her, and a museum devoted to both siblings opened in Hamburg on 29 May 2018.
Source: Fanny Hensel
