Creative Freedom 1836-1839

Expression through Composition

During this period Fanny Hensel attained a new degree of independence in her creativity, but this achievement was hard-won and required painful changes in her relationships with her father and her brother, and reassessing her role as a mother after a devastating miscarriage.

Fanny’s father Abraham Mendelssohn died suddenly in late 1835—less than a week after Fanny’s 30th birthday. Fanny dearly loved and respected her father, but he was strict and extremely traditional—forbidding her to pursue music publicly. After his death she paused her Sunday concerts for a year and a half. She also put down her diary which she had been keeping regularly. Over the following turbulent three and a half years, her composition notebook acted as her diary, and she processed life through her musical works. Abraham once told Fanny that music could only ever be “an ornament” in her life, which may be why so many of Fanny’s pieces until this point were small in scope and modest in style. Now that her father was gone, Fanny’s pieces grew in size, ambition, and virtuosity. The 1830s were the years of the piano virtuoso in Europe, and Fanny’s works of 1838 showcase her abilities as a pianist.

This period was also marked by Fanny’s changing relationship to her brother Felix Mendelssohn. In the months after their father’s death, Fanny was discouraged by the lack of Felix’s customary praise for her compositions and his refusal to encourage her to publish. The following year Felix married, meaning Fanny was no longer his primary partner in life. As a result of these changes in her relationship to her brother, Fanny became more independent of Felix creatively. (The reverse was not true, Felix continued to require Fanny’s advice and critiques of most of his works for the rest of their lives.)

Then in 1837 Fanny suffered a miscarriage, and she would not have any more children. Her only child Sebastian was nearly seven, and the traditional life her father had planned for her—as a wife and mother many times over—would not continue as envisioned. With her intensive duties of mothering babies and young children now completed, she had unexpected time and energy to devote to her music. Over the next year she restarted her Sunday concerts and made her one and only public appearance as piano soloist, performing Felix’s first piano concerto in early 1838.