The history of women overshadowed and elbowed aside by men is nowhere more dispiriting than in classical composing, but turn that proposition on its head and there are discoveries to be made that refresh the canon. The story of “the other Mendelssohn” is a case in point. Fanny Hensel – her married name – was the talented older sister of Felix Mendelssohn. She learned composition alongside her brother, but was confined as an adult to organising and performing in Sunday music salons at the Berlin home of their wealthy banking family. By the time she died, aged 41, she had composed more than 400 pieces. Mendelssohn is known to have passed some of her songs off as his own, as embarrassingly revealed during a singalong with one of his great cheerleaders, Queen Victoria.
But history seldom marches in straight lines. Though Mendelssohn prevented his sister from publishing her music, on the grounds that it “would only disturb her in her primary duties of managing her house”, he was very supportive of another female composer of their circle, Clara Schumann. Nor was he responsible for the misattribution of Fanny’s Easter Sonata, which – in a much later example of patriarchal presumption – was assumed to have been his work when the manuscript was discovered in a Paris bookshop in 1970 under the name F Mendelssohn.
