Journal articles on the topic 'Hensel, Fanny'

The eight articles published here represent the selected proceedings of the conference held at St Catherine's College, Oxford, 22–24 July 2005, under the auspices of the University of Oxford, Faculty of Music, to mark the bicentenary of the birth of Fanny Hensel (née Mendelssohn Bartholdy). As conference organizer I was deeply gratified by the list of speakers and papers we were able to assemble for the conference programme. The conference also featured two concerts given by Françoise Tillard (pianoforte) with Erika Klemperer (violin) and Robert Max (cello), performing piano and chamber works of Fanny Hensel; and April Fredrick (soprano), with Briony Williams accompanying, in lieder of Fanny Hensel and her circle. Peter Ward Jones (Music Librarian, Bodleian Library, Oxford) arranged and introduced an exhibition of materials from the Bodleian's Mendelssohn collection as part of the conference. The opportunity to achieve a close concentration of attention on Fanny Hensel provided by the event is now further developed in the proceedings published in this special issue of Nineteenth-Century Music Review.

This paper originated in the keynote address delivered at the Fanny Hensel bicentenary conference organized by the University of Oxford, Faculty of Music and held at St Catherine's College, Oxford, 22–24 July 2005. As its title suggests, it marks a quarter-century acquaintance with Fanny Hensel. Although in recent years my research has expanded into opera on film, and that has obviously taken me into very different terrain, still Hensel continues to exert a special fascination. Preparing the edition of her letters to Felix Mendelssohn brought me into her private world, a world she assumed would remain private. I came to admire, and even love, her intelligence, her wit and her musical sophistication. It is not unusual for researchers to be enthusiastic about the person they are studying or to identify with them – this may be one reason for choosing that person in the first place, and is undoubtedly a reason why we chose to celebrate Fanny Hensel's bicentenary with the Oxford conference. In short, Fanny Hensel fascinates us.

The idea that Felix Mendelssohn prevented his sister, Fanny Hensel, from publishing her compositions is central to biographical representations of her, including Franççoise Tillard's Fanny Mendelssohn (1992) and Gloria Kamen's Hidden Music (1996). This story can be traced to nineteenth-century publications by male members of the Mendelssohn family and their desire to portray both siblings according to socially acceptable gender roles. Such origins challenge the assumption that the story of Fanny Hensel's "suppression" represents a modern feminist reinterpretation of her life. Instead, current treatment of Hensel relies on common biographical models for male composers; in her lack of a public career, she fits the Romantic stereotype of the neglected, suffering genius. The retelling of the "suppression" of Fanny Hensel represents a "story" in itself - a rescue plot in which modern women rediscover Hensel and somehow "save" her from historical neglect. This feminist recovery relies on the assumption that Hensel was forgotten, overlooking the numerous publications between 1830 and 1920 in which she appears. Centering Hensel's biography on her brother's influence rather than on her eventual publication of her music oversimplifies the larger historical situation for women composers, replacing the manifold issues surrounding gender and class with a single male villain. The difficulties encountered in telling the story of Hensel's life reveal a need for a feminist biography that balances an understanding of larger cultural constraints with recognition of individual female agency.

Clara Schumann, née Wieck (1819–1896), and Fanny Hensel, née Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1805–1847), were among the outstanding women musicians of their time. Both kept diaries that still exist, and from these we can learn a great deal about the inner and outer lives of the two women. Fanny Hensel's diaries were originally used by her son Sebastian for his book Die Familie Mendelssohn, 1729–1847. He gave us her life story as seen through his eyes, and furnished the major information available about his mother until the recent publication of her diaries: Fanny Hensel, Tagebücher. This book was based on the diary manuscripts acquired by the Mendelssohn Archive of the Berlin Staatsbibliothek in 1969, 1970 and 1999. Fanny Hensel's Tagebücher cover the years 1829 to 1847, thus from the year of her marriage to the year of her death.

Background. Numerous research conferences and scholarly papers show increased interest in the creativity of German composer, pianist and singer of the 19th century Fanny Hensel-Mendelssohn. What is particularly noticeable is that her life and creativity are subject of non-scholarly discussion. Writers of biographical works are profoundly interested in the personality of this talented artist, as it gives them material for the discussion of a whole range of issues, in particular those pertaining to the phenomena of female creativity, new concepts of music and history of music with emphasis on its communicative character, correlation between music and gender, establishment of autobiographical character of musical creativity, expression and realization of female creativity under conditions of burgher society. Additional attention is paid to family constellations: Robert and Clara Schumann, brother and sister Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy and Fanny Hensel-Mendelssohn. A very close relationship between Felix Mendelssohn and Fanny HenselMendelssohn opens a new perspective on the dialogical history of music, i. e. the reconstruction of music pieces based on close personal and critical contact in the Mendelssohn family. All these ideas, which researchers started articulating and discussing only recently, found their artistic expression in the biographical novel “Dear Fenchel! The Life of Fanny Hensel-Mendelssohn in Etudes and Intermezzi” («Liebste Fenchel! Das Leben der Fanny Hensel-Mendelssohn in Etüden und Intermezzi», 2011) by the German writer Peter Härtling (1933–2017). Peter Härtling was attracted to the image of Fanny Hensel primarily because she was working in the Romantic aesthetics, which the writer considered the backbone of his own creativity. While working on the novel about Fanny Hensel, Peter Härtling was constantly reading her diaries and listening to her music as well as the music by her brother Felix Mendelssohn. He discovered “a fascinating composer” who was creating music “bravely” through improvisation, even more so, who improvised her own life in a similar fashion. Her “courageous steps” into “female reality” struck the biography writer. Objectives. The research aims at studying the literary image of Fanny Hensel using the ideas of contemporary music scholars regarding creativity of this still little researched artist. Literary reflection of the life and creativity of musician based on combination of fiction and real life is a productive addition to her creative image. Methods. Since the research is centered on the image of a female composer, in many respects it is following the theoretical premises of music gender studies. The complexity of literary recreation to the personality and creativity of composer in the novel was required the sophisticated narrative situation and structure, that justifies the use of narratology as a method of literary criticism’ analysis. Results. Peter Härtling is a well-known master of biographical novel, who has his own creative concept of re-construction the life story of famous artists. When creating a biographical novel, the writer walks on the verge of reality and fiction, rediscovering and creating. The artistic element serves the purpose of amplification and image-creation; it helps to reveal distinctive properties, characteristics and elements of personality of the biographic novel hero. Gaps in documented materials help the narrator behave freely, give a chance for open associations and subjective vision. When outlining the personality lineaments, the narrator follows chronology of the most important events. Yet, plot development in an autobiographical novel is based on separate motifs. Certain life stages and events of a person’s life are depicted in detail in specific chapters and are shown more accurately within the general plot. By running ahead and looking back, the narrator makes it clear that he is above the narrative situation and arranges the depicted events according to the principle of their development. The narrator plays the role of an accompanying of a person portrayed, helping the writer approach to latter in order to understand him. Peter Härtling defines the key narrative principle in the following way: the narration is centered on the relationship of the talented brother and sister, as well as the motives of a mothering care and self-assertion, which are creating the backdrop for the biography of Fanny Mendelssohn. As such, we can see the ways that helped a talented young woman stand against her competitor-brother and get out of his shadow. The author claims that since childhood, the brother and the sister got along with the help of music and it was music that created a tie between them. The novel pays close attention to their discussions of music and the Sunday concerts, which took place at their house. As it is known from letters, it was very important for Felix Mendelssohn to include music into private communication forms. Researchers emphasizes that it made hard for him to be involved in social processes, in which such form of communication was impossible. Based on what Felix Mendelssohn himself said, it is possible to conclude that he was making an opposition between private musical communication as “the world of music” and social music life “as the world of musicians”. Fanny Hensel was not the embodiment of “detached musical practice” of autonomous art for him; on contrary, her creativity was directly linked to real life. Inside the bourgeois home and amid “private circulation of texts”, Fanny Hensel’s music was directly connected to communication, holidays and family rituals, in which the roles of music performer and music listener were “not cemented”, presupposing active inclusion of “amateurs” into music. Private musical practice meant the successful musical communication, the direct communication in music, which was not possible in anonymous publicness. Composer individuality had a chance of growing without being stripped of meaning and understanding. Inside the burgher house and within her immediate circle, Fanny Hensel was the symbol of “illusion of non-detached music”. Peter Härtling attests to autobiographical character of Fanny Hensel’s musical writing. Conclusions. Peter Härtling’s novel shows a cultural change, which stipulated an extended understanding of music as a dynamic process of human activity in a specific, historically varied cultural field. In this respect, Fanny Hensel’s literary portrait touches upon important aspects of female music creativity, actualizing its achievements in contemporary cultural space. Approaching the talented artist in literature is a special combination of art and life, fictitious and real, past and present.

The year 1846 was a watershed for Fanny Hensel: in that year she published collections of music in her own name. Felix Mendelssohn, withholding personal approval of his sister's decision to go public, nonetheless acknowledged a change of status when he offered his ‘professional blessing upon your decision to enter our guild’. This much is well known, but the decision to publish was one of several signs that in the 1840s Hensel sought to set her life-long cultivation of composition on a more formal and professional footing. With her Piano Sonata in G minor (autumn 1843) she tackled a genre largely off-limits to earlier female composers in northern Germany. The genre involved extended instrumental forms and Hensel was alternately confident and full of doubts about her abilities in this area. In a letter to her brother concerning her String Quartet, she pictured herself trapped in the ‘emotional and wrenching’ (‘rührend u. eindringlich’) style of late Beethoven. Countering her brother's criticisms of the quartet she asserted, ambivalently, that she did not lack ‘the compositional skill’ (‘die Schreibart’) to succeed so much as ‘a certain vital force’ (‘ein gewisses Lebensprinzip’) and the ‘strength to sustain my ideas and give them the necessary consistency’.

Cet article met en lumière les aspects innovateurs de la musique pour piano de Fanny Hensel née Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1805-1847). Si plusieurs auteurs ont déjà abordé son style musical, indépendant de celui de son frère Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, personne ne s’était encore penché sur le côté avant-gardiste du langage de la compositrice. Le présent article propose une première étude globale des éléments de sa musique pour piano qui annoncent le romantisme tardif, notamment par l’observation d’extraits de la Sonate en sol mineur (1843), du cycle Das Jahr (1841) et du Lied pour piano en mi bémol majeur (1846), dont l’analyse permet d’effectuer des rapprochements inédits sur le plan des textures, de l’harmonie et du caractère cyclique avec la musique de Richard Wagner, plus particulièrement avec certains passages des opéras Tannhäuser (1845) et Das Rheingold (1853-1854).

In her article ‘The Power of Class: Fanny Hensel’, Nancy Reich draws attention to the significance of social station as a constraint on Fanny Hensel’s musical career. While she acknowledges the existence of other barriers (such as religion, family traditions, and the influence on the Mendelssohns of Enlightenment philosophy), Reich emphasizes the role of contemporary expectations for upper-class women in limiting the scope of Hensel’s public musical activity. The identification of the ‘power of class’ as a factor in the careers of nineteenth-century women composers is an important contribution that deserves further investigation. Reich suggests a productive avenue for the exploration of this topic when she briefly compares Hensel’s career to those of two pianist-composers of lower social standing: Clara Schumann and Marie Pleyel. In this article, I pursue this avenue by comparing Hensel's career to that of another contemporary woman composer of a class lower than hers, namely Josephine Lang.

We are accustomed to seeking the ‘music itself’ in the musical text. The actual and spiritual spaces that are inscribed in music, and the people connected to these sites, are thereby in danger of being left out of consideration. In my view, place and people are part of the music. It is thus against a background of an understanding of music that does not only mean the opuses in the sense of the written musical texts, but also implies all aspects of life connected with the production, reproduction and reception of music, that I offer this enquiry into the meaning of the Leipziger Straβe Drei for the artistic works emanating from Fanny Hensel.

The bicentenary year of Fanny Hensel's birth generated a welcome degree of renewed attention to her life and music. Viewing these against the backcloth of debates about the relationships between women and the culture to which they contribute (and which they also consume) suggests a tension between, on the one hand, the image of a female composer in conflict with a patriarchal order and, on the other hand, the impression of a composer for whom considerable creative power lay in the cultural environment that she inhabited. While it is true that Hensel faced social and cultural barriers because of her sex, in order to understand her music it is essential that we consider the ways in which she could be seen to overcome those barriers, or even destroy them, through the expression of her personal voice in her compositions. Hensel's life demonstrates how closely bound up together biography and aesthetics really are. The way in which her life is portrayed can be seen to colour listeners' judgement of her music.

At first glance, Fanny Hensel's Andante espressivo in A♭ major – the first of the Vier Lieder für das Pianoforte op. 6, published in June 1847 just weeks after her death – impresses as a concise example of a textless, nocturne-like song cut from the cloth of her short piano character pieces and occasionally, but just occasionally, reminiscent of her brother's more celebrated Lieder ohne Worte. The 61 bars of the Andante show the gifts of an accomplished songwriter as they unfold an uninterrupted, ‘singing’ soprano melody, at times euphonious and lyrical, at times poignant and passionate, above a gently rippling accompaniment of arpeggiated triplets. The basic structure of the composition is clear enough. We hear in succession: 1) the melody in the tonic and a modulation (10 bars) to 2) a statement on the dominant (13 bars); 3) a retransition and dominant pedal point (9 bars) leading to 4) the return of the opening in the tonic (16 bars), further supported by 5) a coda, drawn once again from the melody (13 bars). The compositional plan is thus one of statement, departure and return, a familiar sequence Hensel employed in the majority of her short piano pieces, and yet a deceptively simple strategy that afforded her considerable latitude, within the circumscribed, epigrammatic realm of the piano miniature, to explore a wide emotional range of colours, textures and musico-poetic ideas.

Статья посвящена непосредственным композиторским откликам на поздние квартеты Бетховена. Наряду с более известными, но недостаточно освещенными в отечественной литературе струнными квартетами Феликса Мендельсона-Бартольди рассматривается также Квартет Es-dur его сестры Фанни Хензель (1805-1847), талантливого композитора и музыкального деятеля, чье творчество - несмотря на имеющийся опыт музыкально-исторического и аналитического его рассмотрения - еще не вошло в общие представления о развитии музыки в XIX веке. Между тем этот квартет вписывает интересную страницу в историю жанра; он заслуживает внимания как музыковедов, так и исполнителей и слушателей. The article is devoted to some direct composers’ responses to Beethoven’s late string quartets. Along with better known but not well-studied in the Russian musicological tradition string quartets by Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, it is about the Quartet in E-flat Major by Fanny Hensel (1805–1847), Felix’s sister, a talented composer and musician, whose work— despite the abundance of music historical and analytical essays—has not yet entered into general ideas about the development of music in the 19th century. Meanwhile, this quartet inscribes an interesting page in the history of the genre; it deserves the attention of musicologists as well as performers and listeners.

Throughout her lifetime, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel was primarily known as the sister of the musical genius, Felix Mendelssohn, as the daughter of her distinguished parents, Lea and Abraham Mendelssohn and as the wife of her artistic husband, August Wilhelm Hensel. Today, Hensel is remembered for her remarkable musical talents and a wide breadth of compositions. Though often passed over as a woman in the nineteenth-century, Fanny Hensel played a key role in the musical life of the city of Berlin. Hensel’s musical voice was defined by her comprehensive musical education and through her Sonntagsmusiken (translated “Sunday Musicales”). In the next generation, British author Virginia Woolf shed light on the obstacles to a female artist’s life. In the essay, A Room of One’s Own, Woolf outlined the main elements necessary to create art: financial security and a room to one’s self. For Hensel, financial security was ensured through her family, yielding for her a rich musical education. Hensel was given a private space for her creative work in an adjacent building called the Gartenhaus. This paper investigates how Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel’s educational and performance opportunities shaped her compositional voice and circumscribed her influence on nineteenth-century Berlin musical society.

In this article we explore Fanny Hensel’s songs that end without cadences but instead with what William Caplin (2018) calls “prolongational closure.” These songs, most of which come from the 1820s, are some of the earliest examples of piece-ending prolongational closure in the repertoire and thus offer important models for understanding how the technique was deployed by later composers. We propose three types of prolongational closure, drawn from a study of Hensel’s works—".fn_scaledegree(5)."–".fn_scaledegree(1)." fill, dominant substitution, and early pedal—and suggest that Hensel’s fascination with non-cadential endings offers yet more evidence that she was one of the most inventive composers in the first half of the nineteenth century.

In this article we explore Fanny Hensel’s songs that end without cadences but instead with what William Caplin (2018) calls “prolongational closure.” These songs, most of which come from the 1820s, are some of the earliest examples of piece-ending prolongational closure in the repertoire and thus offer important models for understanding how the technique was deployed by later composers. We propose three types of prolongational closure, drawn from a study of Hensel’s works—".fn_scaledegree(5)."–".fn_scaledegree(1)." fill, dominant substitution, and early pedal—and suggest that Hensel’s fascination with non-cadential endings offers yet more evidence that she was one of the most inventive composers in the first half of the nineteenth century.

This study explores the expressive role of triple hypermeter in music with text, using the songs of Fanny Hensel as a case study. Drawing upon work by Harald Krebs, Yonatan Malin, and Richard Cohn, I examine the musical and poetic contexts in which triple hypermeter tends to occur. Passages of triple hypermeter in Hensel’s songs, I argue, often result from the distortion of duple norms. Where the natural poetic rhythm of a text may suggest a duple setting, Hensel deviates from that hypothetical model, stretching and shortening hypermeasures to emphasize important words, to vary the speed with which lines are sung, or to create a feeling of instability or uncertainty that reinforces a related poetic idea. Distorted hypermetric states thus correspond with distorted emotional or perceptual states. Likewise, shifts from one hypermetric state to another correspond with poetic shifts from one mood to another, one perspective to another, or one poetic structure to another. By exploring how Hensel calibrates the hypermetric flow of her music to the sense and structure of the poems she sets, we can see that hypermeter functions not just as an abstract phenomenon but as a carrier of deep expressive meaning.

Abstract The 1880s saw a burgeoning of exhibitions of ‘Women’s Work’ across the world. These events focused on the artistic and industrial abilities of women, signifying an unprecedented shift away from the emphasis usually placed on maleness and masculinized technology in contemporary exhibition culture. The first Exhibition, held in Bristol in 1885, included a musical novelty: a concert entirely of works composed by women. The next, in Sydney in 1888, included a whole series of such concerts. These concerts—containing works by Kate Loder, Clara Wieck, Fanny Hensel, Agnes Zimmermann, and Maude Valérie White—were extraordinarily well received, applauded in both concept and execution. Yet, their reception appears paradoxical against the contemporary critical climate. In both Britain and Australia, the ‘question’ of women composers was widely debated, and works met with condescension or hostility. By exploring the expectations surrounding displays of ‘women’s work’, I argue that it was the exhibition context itself that influenced the reception of this music. While Exhibitions were conventionally seen as male-gendered events, ‘Women’s’ Exhibitions allowed organizers to blur the distinctions between private and public space. Similarly, while women composers were criticized for their encroachment in the male concert sphere, these Exhibitions also blurred these boundaries and gave critics an appropriate ‘feminine’ framework through which to view and critique the works.