page_title: Fanny Mendelssohn
section_title: Felix and Fanny
hierarchical_section_title: Fanny Mendelssohn / Life / Felix and Fanny
context_page_description: Fanny Mendelssohn, later Fanny [Cäcilie] Mendelssohn Bartholdy and, after her marriage, Fanny Hensel, was a German composer and pianist from the Romantic era. She grew up in Berlin, Germany, and received a thorough musical education from teachers including her mother, Ludwig Berger, and Carl Friedrich Zelter. Her brother Felix Mendelssohn, also a composer and pianist, shared the same education and the two developed a close relationship. Due to the reservations of her family, and to social conventions of the time about the roles of women, a number of her works were published under her brother's name in his Opus 8 and 9 collections. In 1829, she married the artist Wilhelm Hensel and, in 1830, the two had their only child, Sebastian Hensel. In 1846, despite the continuing ambivalence of her family towards her musical ambitions, Fanny Hensel published a collection of songs as her Opus 1. The next year, she suddenly died of a stroke.
  She composed over 460 pieces of music, including a piano trio, a piano quartet, an orchestral overture, four cantatas, over 125 pieces for the piano, and over 250 lieder, most of which went unpublished in her lifetime.
context_section_description: The siblings' bond was strengthened by their shared passion for music. Fanny's works were often played alongside her brother's at the family home in Berlin in a Sunday concert series (Sonntagskonzerte), which was originally organised by her father and after 1831 carried on by Fanny herself. In 1822, when Fanny was 17 and Felix 13, she wrote "Up to the present moment I possess his [Felix's] unbounded confidence. I have watched the progress of his talent step by step, and may say I have contributed to his development. I have always been his only musical adviser, and he never writes down a thought before submitting it to my judgment."
  In 1826/1827 Felix arranged with Fanny for some of her songs to be published under his name, three in his Op. 8 collection and three more in his Op. 9. In 1842, this resulted in an embarrassing moment when Queen Victoria, receiving Felix at Buckingham Palace, expressed her intention of singing to the composer her favourite of his songs, Italien (to words by Franz Grillparzer), which Felix confessed was by Fanny.
  There was a lifelong musical correspondence between the two. Fanny helped Felix by providing constructive criticism of pieces and projects, which he always considered very carefully. Felix would rework pieces solely based on the suggestions she made, and nicknamed her "Minerva" after the Roman goddess of wisdom. Their correspondence of 1840/41 reveals that they were both outlining scenarios for an opera on the subject of the Nibelungenlied: Fanny wrote "The hunt with Siegfried's death provides a splendid finale to the second act."
caption: Felix Mendelssohn aged 12 (1821) by Carl Joseph Begas
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