When Felix Mendelssohn visited Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in 1842, the Queen, who apparently had a delightful singing voice, chose a song, ‘Italien’ (published as Felix’s Op 8 No 3), from a bunch of songs that he had brought along with him. Felix then had to admit to the Queen that the song had actually been composed by his sister, Fanny.
Born with a hunchback condition inherited from her grandfather (the eminent Jewish enlightenment philosopher Moses Mendelssohn), Fanny had much to contend with. She was a supremely talented composer and pianist but was discouraged by her brother and father from taking her music into the wider public domain. They, and some commentators believe that she too, considered such a thing to be inappropriate for a woman, particularly of her social standing – a very typical attitude at that time. (Clara Schumann was one of the few women who broke the mould in this respect – but her story deserves a whole chapter of its own. Clara and Fanny did know each other but their growing friendship was cut short by Fanny’s death.) It is also possible that Fanny herself As time went by, Felix became increasingly keen for Fanny’s compositions to be heard and attributed correctly to her outside the musical salons in Berlin that she hosted and played at.
Miriam’s Song of Praise (1836) by Wilhelm Hensel, husband of Fanny Mendelssohn. Given to Queen Victoria, in exchange for a diamond and emerald ring to be worn by Fanny, who Hensel painted as Miriam in this painting. Also depicted are Fanny’s sister Rebecka and her sister-in-law Albertine.
It was inevitable that young Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn would develop many similar characteristics in their musical style. Apart from anything, they both had the same composition teacher – Carl Friedrich Zelter. The similarity is very apparent in Fanny’s string quartet (written 1834) in much of the fundamental manner of string writing and emotional temperature of the music. There are a couple of places where their immediate influence on each other is particularly apparent. Firstly, the melody in the viola in this section in the first movement:
This theme is uncannily similar to this melody in the aria ‘Herr Gott Abrahams’ in Felix Mendelssohn’s oratorio Elijah, written ten years after Fanny’s quartet.
(Could this be a hidden tribute to the Mendelssohn’s father, Abraham?)
'Elijah' theme
In the second movement the 2nd violin plays this:
Similar theme to Felix's Op 13
…which is very like the main descending theme of Felix’s quartet in A, Op 13, written seven years earlier:
Felix A minor theme
Their two musical styles are distinct though, and it is good to feature Fanny’s quartet in our current programme. The first movement alone is a treasure of distilled intense sentiment that we love more and more, each time we play it.
The close relationship between brother and sister, personally and artistically – Felix liked to call Fanny ‘Minerva’ goddess of wisdom, he respected her advice so much – has many parallels with the Brontë and Wordsworth families. They were all at the forefront of the early romantic movement, writing and composing around dining room tables in candle or oil lamp lit rooms, forging a way forward that was to change the literary and musical landscape for ever.
