Fanny Hensel created some of the most imaginative and original music of her era, making her arguably the most gifted female composer of the nineteenth century. While Hensel has finally stepped out of the shadow of her famous brother, Felix Mendelssohn, as scholars have begun to study her life and writings, her music has remained surprisingly underexamined. This collection places Hensel's music at the center, focusing on the genre that not only made up more than half of her creative output but also, as Hensel herself put it, "suits her best": song. In eleven new essays, leading scholars in the fields of music theory and musicology consider Hensel's songs from a wide range of angles, covering topics such as Hensel's fascination with particular poets and poetic themes; her innovative harmonic, melodic, rhythmic, and textual strategies; and her connection to larger literary and musical trends. The chapters also provide insight into Hensel's efforts to break free from the constraints placed on her as a woman and her place in the larger history of the nineteenth-century Lied. Drawing on diverse biographical, historical, cultural, and musical contexts for their detailed discussions of Hensel's songs, the authors underline Hensel's historical importance and deepen our understanding and appreciation of her compositions. This volume, in short, finally gives Fanny Hensel and her songs the stage that they deserve.

Granddaughter of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn and sister of the composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Fanny Hensel (1805-1847) was an extraordinary musician who left well over four hundred compositions, most of which fell into oblivion until their rediscovery late in the twentieth century. In Fanny Hensel: The Other Mendelssohn, R. Larry Todd offers a compelling, authoritative account of Hensel's life and music, and her struggle to emerge as a publicly recognized composer.

From the Mendelssohn archive in Berlin come these sixteen never-before-published Romantic lieder by Fannie Mendelssohn Hensel. These inspired compositions have the balanced legato of the classical composers and the sensitive feeling and colorful harmonies of the dawning Romantic era. Includes historical background , idiomatic and word-by-word translation of foreign texts and transcriptions into the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel (1805-47), pianist and composer, maintained a prolific and witty correspondence with her younger brother Felix over the course of approximately 25 years, which is here presented in English translation, with the original German for reference. As the leader of a vibrant salon, Hensel deploys her critical prowess to describe Berlin musical life, including its conservative institutions and personalities, as well as to evaluate Felix's works-in-progress in detail. We also learn about Hensel's own compositions, her attitudes toward herself as a composer, and the significance of Felix's views on the formation of those attitudes. Hensel's letters provide a fascinating glimpse into the problems and challenges facing gifted women musicians in the nineteenth century. The 150 letters are drawn from the Green Books collection of letters addressed to Felix Mendelssohn, in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Reviews-These letters reveal Fanny Mendelssohn to be a thoroughly fascinating individual, one whose special relationship to Felix would be enough to guarantee the interest of the documents. But we soon become engrossed with Fanny herself, as composer, as critic, as musical commentator and figure in the musical life of Berlin. To watch this world through her eyes is to watch it come alive through the wisdom, wit, and grace of a remarkable person. Citron has a gift for rendering the substance and spirit of these letters into charming and effective English prose that preserves something of the formality of nineteenth-century discourse together with the passion and spirit of Fanny Mendelssohn. Philip Gossett ...reading this volume is a pleasure, not just a musicological duty. Clifford Bartlettthe volume contains penetrating and highly scholarly critical commentaries and is a valuable addition to mendelssohniana. J.R. Belanger, Choice, April 1988

As one of the foremost composers, conductors, and pianists of the nineteenth century, Felix Mendelssohn played a fundamental role in the shaping of modern musical tastes through his contributions to the early music revival and the formation of the Austro-German musical canon. His career allows for a remarkable meeting point for critical engagement with a host of crucial issues in the last two centuries of music history, including the relation between musical meaning and social function, programmatic and absolute music, notions of classicism and Romanticism, modernism and historicism. It also serves as a pertinent case-study of the roles political ideology, racism, and musical ignorance may play in creating and perpetuating a composer's posthumous reception. Fittingly, Rethinking Mendelssohn focuses on critical engagement with the composer's music and aesthetics, and on the interpretation of his works in relation to contemporaneous culture. Building on the renaissance in Mendelssohn scholarship of the last two decades, Rethinking Mendelssohn sets a fresh and exciting tone for research on the composer. Opening new ways of understanding Mendelssohn and setting the future direction of Mendelssohn studies, the contributing scholars pay particular attention to Mendelssohn's contested views on the relationship between art and religion, analysis of Mendelssohn's instrumental music in the wake of recent controversies in Formenlehre, and the burgeoning interest in his previously neglected contribution to the German song.

24 Songs by Felix Mendelssohn and Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel contains youthful gems by two great Romantic composers, originally published only under Felix Mendelssohn's name. Includes word-by-word translations of the Italian, French and German text as well as a translation into the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Introduction / Stephen Rodgers -- Nature and Travel. The Wilderness at Home : Woods-Romanticism in Fanny Hensel's Eichendorff Songs / Amanda Lalonde ; Waldszenen and Abendbilder : Fanny Hensel, Nikolaus Lenau, and the Nature of Melancholy / Scott Burnham ; Songs of Travel : Fanny Hensel's Wanderings / Susan Wollenberg -- Settings of English Verse. Women's Private Cosmopolitanism in Literary Translation and Song : Fanny Hensel's Drei Lieder nach Heinrich Heine von Mary Alexander / Jennifer Ronyak ; In this elusive language: A Byron Song by Fanny Hensel / Susan Youens -- Tonal Ingenuity. You too may change : Tonal Pairing of the Tonic and Subdominant in Two Songs by Fanny Hensel / Tyler Osborne ; Plagal Cadences in Fanny Hensel's Songs / Stephen Rodgers -- Responses to Poetic Form. Working with Words : Revisions of Declamation in Fanny Hensel's Song Autographs / Harald Krebs ; Modulating Couplets in Fanny Hensel's Songs / Yonatan Malin -- Beyond Song/Beyond Hensel. Reading Poetry Through Music: Fanny Hensel and Others / Jürgen Thym ; Fanny Hensel's Lieder (ohne Worte) and the Boundaries of Song : The Curious Case of the Lied in Db major, Op. 8, No. 3 / R. Larry Todd.