Fanny Mendelssohn was never lost.
But she’s certainly been found. Including by violist Laura De St. Croix and the NouLou Chamber Players.
“I heard a quartet being played on the radio, on WUOL, and thought, ‘Oh, that’s so pretty,’ ” says De St. Croix. “I didn’t know who the composer was, but I thought it sounded like Felix Mendelssohn. We had just played his Octet, so I kind of had him on my mind. And it definitely sounded like that period.”
She kept listening and liked what she heard.
“And sure enough, at the end they said it’s by Fanny. I thought, “’That’s so cool. I’d like to play it.’ ”
And so she shall.
One of the neat aspects of the NouLou Chamber Players is the players, themselves, pick the pieces they perform in concerts. De St. Croix signed up violinists Dillon Welch and Brittany MacWilliams, and cellist Lindy Tsai, to join her viola in a quartet, and got the piece on the playlist for a NouLou concert this Monday evening, Feb. 10, at the Library at Oxmoor Farm
The performance could be a Louisville premier for the Quartet in E-flat by Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel (her married name with artist Wilhelm Hensel) – just 191 years after she wrote it.
What took so long?
Nobody knew about it.
Historians and performers have long known Fanny as the four years older sister of composer Felix Mendelssohn, and Felix’ musical muse. But not as a composer. Only a handful of works by her were published, and it is only in recent years that some 400 previously unknown pieces turned up in a trove in the former East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Most of the pieces are songs – lieder. But the quartet is a more substantial work.
Everybody (who was anybody) knew Fanny
In her lifetime Fanny Mendelssohn was what we might today call “privately famous.” Family and friends in her wealthy circle knew she was a concert-quality pianist, and often heard her perform in recitals in the music room of the Mendelssohn home in Berlin. When she was 15, Fanny learned for memory all 24 preludes of Bach’s Well-Tempered Klavier and performed them as a birthday tribute to her father. Later, she helped younger brother Felix shape and polish his first major piece, the Octet. Brother and sister remained close through their lives, both dying within months of each other in 1847: he at the age of 38, she was 42.
But Fanny was never a concert pianist, nor a popular composer. That would have gone against her father’s wishes. In a letter Abraham Mendelssohn wrote to his daughter when she was 20, the father said, “Music will perhaps become (Felix’) profession, while for you it can and must be only an ornament.”
Felix didn’t disagree.
“From my knowledge of Fanny,” he said, “I should say that she has neither inclination nor vocation for authorship. She is too much all that a woman ought to be for this. She regulates her house, and neither thinks of the public nor of the musical world, nor even of music at all, until her first duties are fulfilled. Publishing would only disturb her in these, and I cannot say that I approve of it.”
Those were simply the times. There weren’t many female composers, and certainly no wealthy ones.
“But Hensel was undeterred in her way,” notes music writer Kyle MacMillan, in an article about Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel for the Chicago Symphony. “She made composition a daily regimen and was able to get her works heard through fortnightly private concerts in the Mendelssohn family home. These soirees included chamber music, concert versions of the Mozart operas and Bach Cantatas, and music notables of the time would often attend.”
So today, as women gain prominence in composition and performance, the NouLou Chamber Players think it’s neat to bring Fanny Mendelssohn’s music forward for classical fans to hear.
“And easier said than done,” says De St. Croix. “Our violinist Dillon Welch was reviewing the score, and he found a ton of mistakes in the version we had. So we had to scramble to find a better version. And we wanted to be sure we had the rights. It should be technically public domain by now, but it’s just so newly discovered.”
Then came learning the music.
“Overall, the piece is in E-flat major, as the title suggests, but the opening is sort of ambiguous. It starts in the darker relative key of C minor, and it has the essence of being somber.”
But doesn’t stay that way.
“Typically, in a piece from this era, you expect sonata form, but it’s not in sonata form,” says De St. Croix. “The first movement is slow, second movement is fast, third slow, and then again the fourth movement is fast. I’ve been reading quotes by Fanny, and she admits some of her ideas are undeveloped.
But that works for her quartet. “She’s coming after Beethoven and Schubert, and by that time they were pretty hefty. Her quartet is not on such a grand scale, a bit shorter and more fluid. And I think it’s extremely beautiful.”
Neatness counts
Also on the NouLou program is a Stravinsky Pastorale for five wind instruments, and a Martinu Sextet for Piano and Winds. Both feature double-reeded instruments, including oboe, English horn and bassoon.
It could be interesting to hear if the Igor Stravinsky piece is as “far out there” as we might think of his Firebird or Rite of Spring. Reading about the composer we find Stravinsky was lean, neat and meticulous. He planned each day carefully, with meals at certain times, and cocktails mixed precisely. His working studio was sound-proofed, requiring entry through two doors. And the notes on his manuscripts were beautifully penned. Like calligraphy.
