![]() “She was just a remarkable woman,” Christian says. Though Fanny did not fully realize her creative ambitions during her short life, it would be wrong to see her as a tragic figure. Many experts believe that his death was caused by heartbreak over the loss of his sister. Sadly, she died of a stroke in 1847, before the majority of her work could be published. By then, Fanny felt ready to defy the expectations of her father and brothers, and she agreed to release her compositions. In 1846, when she was 41-years-old, Fanny was approached by publishers who were interested in disseminating her work. It reflects the high level of playing that she was at, at that point.” “It's very ambitious, it’s very tightly handled. ![]() “I view as sort of a finishing piece for her education,” Christian explains. Its fourth and final movement features a rumbling tremolo, a reference to the biblical account of Jesus’ resurrection, which is said to have caused an earthquake. The piece is grand and sweeping, shaped by the influences of Beethoven and Bach. The discovery of the Easter Sonata further cements Fanny as a masterful composer in her own right. Taken together, Christian says, these were “major factors pointing to the identification that was hers.” The manuscript also contained page numbers that were missing from a different manuscript known to have been authored by Fanny. “I was able to see that it was in handwriting,” Christian says. When she had the opportunity to examine the manuscript in person, her suspicions about its authorship were confirmed. But in 2010, Christian was able to trace it to a private archive in France. It is not clear when the work was first ascribed to Felix the earliest evidence of the mistaken attribution is a 1972 recording of the Easter Sonata, which names Felix as the composer.įor decades, scholars believed that the original manuscript was lost. Fanny mentioned the work in letters to her family and friends, but the Easter Sonata did not receive public recognition during her lifetime, according to Hannah Furness of the Independent. ![]() The Easter Sonata was Fanny’s second piano sonata, composed when she was just 23. “When Felix visited Queen Victoria, she sang one of Fanny’s songs,” Christian says, because the queen thought it was by him. The works appeared under his name, which led to a rather awkward encounter with the British monarch. On one occasion, she allowed Felix, who reportedly admitted that his sister was the better pianist, to include six of her songs in his Opus 8 and Opus 9. These concerts gave her an opportunity to perform her own works-she composed about 500 of them during her lifetime, according to the Encylopedia Britannica.īut Fanny rarely published her compositions. After her marriage to Wilhelm Hensel in 1829, Fanny began to host a private concert series, complete with choirs and instrumentalists. Though Fanny’s professional aspirations fizzled, she became a dynamic fixture of Berlin’s music culture in the early 19th century. “Publicity was associated with loose morals and possibly amoral behavior.” “ very high class, and a high class woman did not appear publicly as a professional,”Christian explains. While Fanny’s father encouraged his daughter to perform in the family home, he believed it would be indecent for a woman of her status to pursue any kind of career. Their talents, however, were not fostered with equal enthusiasm. ![]() “They knew each other's work, note by note, before it ever hit paper.” “They had all the same teachers as kids growing up, so their styles actually merged,” says Christian, now an assistant professor of music history at Colorado State University, in an interview with. Like her brother, she began to display remarkable musical talents as a young child, mastering Bach’s thorny Well-Tempered Clavierby the age of 14. Long obscured by the shadow of her brother’s legacy, Fanny has now emerged into the spotlight.īorn in 1805, Fanny was a virtuosic, prolific, and vastly underappreciated pianist. Pianist Sofya Gulyak performed the piece at the Royal College of Music in London. Today, in honor of International Women’s Day, the Easter Sonata premiered under Fanny’s name for the first time, reports Mark Savage for the BBC. After analyzing the manuscript and following a “documentary trail” of letters and diaries, she concluded that the author of the Easter Sonata was not Felix, but his beloved older sister, Fanny. But Christian suspected that this attribution was wrong. Then a graduate student at Duke University, she made the trip to study a 19th-century manuscript of the Easter Sonata-an ambitious piece credited to the German composer Felix Mendelssohn. In 2010, Angela Mace Christian traveled to Paris on a hunch.
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