Writer and film-maker Sheila Hayman tells an inspirational story here about her great-great-great-grandmother, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel; her film constitutes an important critique of today’s classical music world in which 90% of concerts are of works by men.
Fanny was the brilliant but neglected composer who spent her entire lifetime and much of her afterlife in the shadow of her famous (and adored) composer younger brother Felix. Many of her pieces were attributed to him, including the sparkling lied Italien, which had the honour of being sung by no less a person than Queen Victoria when Felix was a guest at Buckingham Palace in 1842 (he sheepishly admitted the injustice at the time).
It was Felix who was encouraged in a serious musical career by their very conservative family, Fanny was permitted only to pursue music as an “ornament” to being a wife and mother; yet her private genius produced hundreds of works, many still unperformed. These include the Easter Sonata, which only recently had its premiere, performed by the brilliant pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason whose superb engagement with the work is an education to any viewer.
Interviews with music scholars Marcia Citron and Angela R Mace show how extraordinarily difficult it has been to recover the original manuscripts of the Easter Sonata and other works from archives and auction houses in which there is conservatism and outright obstruction. The original handwritten pages of the Easter Sonata seem to have been covertly ripped out of the bound volume which found its way to the State Library in Berlin and sold at auction in Paris in the 70s; a great deal of detective work was needed to track it down. It’s a great story of a long-overdue revival.
• Fanny: The Other Mendelssohn is released on 27 October in UK cinemas.
