taking sides - Alma Mahler vs Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel

BUMPEN SIE BITTE

R. Larry Todd's biography Fanny Hensel: The Other Mendelssohn is making for very interesting (and detailed) reading. Though apparently in the end someone dies just as their career starts taking off. And then she doesn't have most of her work published until about 1990. So, it's a bit of a downer.

I'll try to find some representative quotes, but Todd's opinion is approximately this: Fanny stands alone as an adventurous and inventive composer, frequently more so than Felix Mendelssohn in some ways, and far less derivative of her brother than was previously assumed.

An excellent condensed version of Fanny's story appeared in 2007 in the Kapralova Society Journal:

http://web.archive.org/web/20081008153703/http://www.kapralova.org/journal9.pdf

(written by Eugene Gates)

Since all of Hensel’s works were created for presentation at her Sunday musicales, it is important to remember that her choice of genres was largely dictated by the performing forces at her disposal. It was also probably determined to some extent by the fact that her brother discouraged her from writing large-scale works. However, on the evidence of such beautifully crafted, extended compositions as the Op. 11 Piano Trio, the E flat major String Quartet, and the G minor Piano Sonata, one is led to speculate that, given the same encouragement and professional opportunities as her brother, she might well have become his rival as a symphonist.

Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel was both a victim and a survivor. In light of her upbringing, it must have taken enormous courage for her to defy convention by making the leap from the private sphere of the salon – her allotted place as a female creator – to the public sphere of the published composer. To borrow the words of a recent critic, "Although no one may have danced to her 'piping' during her lifetime, to ignore her now would be a very large loss indeed." [James Parsons, 1986]

It's classical music, 1986 is like yesterday.

A couple of pieces by Mendelssohn-Hensel to start with:

One of her largest-scale ones, "Oratorio on Scenes from the Bible" No it's not "Bachian", f*** you <- Note to self

And the Four Songs for Piano, op 8, from 1850 (her third collection with that title). Sounds like a vinyl rip, tho I dunno if it can be

Obscurity and reputation

Yes, I am being obscurist. I'm not sorry, U can all eat it ;)

Got to be done... With regard to female composers, it's surely inevitable that there'll be more historical revisionism in future, just like in any field that was so male-dominated for so long. From Fanny's story, it's shocking how this state of affairs was maintained through 'politeness' and presumptions, rather than outright threat. It was Berlin high society, with its ingrained idea that a woman couldn't and wouldn't become a composer, and certainly not one of any merit. Even Fanny herself is quoted doing down the 'femininity' and inferiority of her works. Some news reports on her piano recitals didn't name her, to protect her modesty. She still won many supporters, and she was having her work published for a short time before she passed away.

On a related topic, thinking about shifts in reputation over time: have many obscure older composers gained traction in the past 30-50 years? Which ones do you think? (Obv inspired by that thread, "Vanilla Ice went from hero to zero".)

Fanny's music was performed in a 2010 Juilliard concert series in New York City:
http://www.juilliard.edu/journal/out-shadows-showcase-works-fanny-mendelssohn-hensel

At the moment it looks like she gets played a lot in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, and not so much elsewhere:
http://www.fannyhensel.de/hensel_eng/konzf_frame.htm

Alma Mahler I don't know about, hopefully there's a long book?

I would love to read a biography of Fanny Hensel! I happen to think her brother was an extremely adventurous and inventive composer, but I know that some disagree.

Todd would agree too, I'm sure – he also wrote a bio of Felix. Can't remember which pieces he used as examples, but it was only to emphasize Fanny's technical gifts, rather than what her brother lacked.

There are multiple books about Alma, the most famous of which is called Bride of the Wind.

Cheers Jon. With the Fanny Hensel book, I was lucky to stumble across it in the city library among the rock biogs. Which just proves that she 'rocks', or "she's the dope", or however the young people are expressing admiration nowadays.

Leafing through to try and find the bit where Todd writes the academic equivalent of "Fanny > Felix lol"... uh, I couldn't find it. So instead, here's a sibling squabble, which is also quite enlightening:

"Writing to Felix, Fanny observed that her brother had successfully worked his way through Beethoven's late style and 'progressed beyond it [...] my lengthy things die in their youth of decrepitude; I lack the ability to sustain ideas properly and give them the needed consistency.'

[...] Matters indeed came to a head in the fall of 1834 when she completed between August 23 and October 23 one of her most ambitious works, the String Quartet in E-Flat Major (H-U 277). This was the composition, as we shall see, that prompted Felix to write a critique in January 1835, to which Fanny replied with the self-deprecating comments cited above.

[...] [The first three movements] use tonality in an expressive way that further separates her from the eighteenth-century traditions in which [Carl Friedrich] Zelter had trained her and Felix. She deemphasizes the keys of the three movements so that the tonal hierarchy rests more on harmonic associations and implications than on conventional, dominant-to-tonic cadential gestures.

[...] Felix praised the tonal swaying ('Wanken' lol) between E-flat major and C minor at the outset of the quartet as 'schön', but the subsequent persistent appearance of F minor in the first movement and some tonal ambiguities in the second and third convinced him that Fanny had mistakenly embraced a mannerism ('Mannier'). For Felix, tonal clarity was an imperative, and form enhanced that clarity. 'Don't consider me a Philistine,' he insisted; 'I am not, and believe I am right in having more respect than before for form and proper craft, or however one calls the trade terms. Just send me soon something nice, for otherwise I'll think you have struck me dead as a critic.'

What Fanny sent in her next letter was a healthy dose of her own criticism, though not, she assured him, 'a tit-for-tat action'."

(from pp178-186 of Fanny Hensel. Full disclosure, I dunno what all the words mean, but quoted for truthiness)

The quartet, in all its controversy(!), is at
https://youtu.be/biWrI7O0s1U

On a related topic, thinking about shifts in reputation over time: have many obscure older composers gained traction in the past 30-50 years? Which ones do you think?

Don't make me challops the thread in order to create a semblance of "debate". Well, you leave me no choice. Here are some Comp-Rep Facts which are literally undebateable:

1. Nobody had heard of Haydn, Telemann, Vivaldi, Scarlatti, Rameau, or Mozart until the 1985 Britannica encyclopedia came out (see table on page 8 of the PDF)
2. The Three B's are all no longer alive. Also Beethoven wrote Peanuts
3. Elizabeth Lutyens, Arthur Bliss, William Walton and Humphrey Searle have totally sold out
4. Nicolai Yakovlevich Myaskovsky and Josquin des Prez used to be bigger than Jesus
[/facts]

The music thought too "masculine" to have been written by a woman

When the long-lost Easter Sonata was discovered in a French bookshop in 1970 marked "F Mendelssohn", many scholars assumed it was the work of the composer Felix Mendelssohn. But in 2010, US scholar Dr Angela Mace Christian proved that the work had in fact been written by Felix's talented sister, Fanny.

Sofya Gulyak played the UK premiere of this major piano sonata live on Radio 3 on International Women's Day 2017: the first performance of the work to be given under the correct composer name. Listen now. [Only available until 7 April 2017]

More about Angela Christian's discovery - http://source.colostate.edu/csu-music-professor-solves-mystery-composers-sister-140-years-later