Fanny Hensel (1805–1847)

Born in Hamburg in 1805, Fanny Mendelssohn grew up in Berlin in a wealthy, cultured family. She received the same musical training as her younger brother Felix, with the composer Carl Friedrich Zelter; as a child she played the first book of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier from memory.

Her father, however, held that music could only be an “ornament” for her, not a profession. Several of her songs first appeared under Felix’s name, in his collections Op. 8 and Op. 9. In 1829 she married the painter Wilhelm Hensel, who encouraged her to compose.

In the family home in Berlin she organised and led the Sonntagsmusiken, Sunday concerts where her music and her brother’s were played before Berlin society. After a journey to Italy she wrote Das Jahr (1841), twelve piano pieces, one for each month of the year.

Only in 1846 did she decide to publish under her own name, with the Six Songs Op. 1. She died suddenly the following year, aged forty-one; Felix, devastated, died a few months after her.