In turn Fanny helped Felix by constructive criticism of pieces and projects, which he always considered very carefully. In 1842 this resulted in an embarrassing moment when Queen Victoria, receiving Felix at Buckingham Palace, expressed her intention of singing the composer her favourite of his songs, Italien, which Mendelssohn confessed was by Fanny. Felix did arrange with Fanny for some of her songs to be published under his name, three in his Op. The siblings shared a great passion for music. Publishing would only disturb her in these, and I cannot say that I approve of it.” 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. She is too much all that a woman ought to be for this. “From my knowledge of Fanny I should say that she has neither inclination nor vocation for authorship. Although Felix was privately broadly supportive of her as a composer and a performer, he was cautious (professedly for family reasons) of her publishing her works under her own name. Her father wrote to her in 1820 “Music will perhaps become his profession, while for you it can and must be only an ornament. However, Fanny was limited by prevailing attitudes of the time toward women, attitudes apparently shared by her father, who was tolerant, rather than supportive, of her activities as a composer. She may also have been influenced by the role-models of her great-aunts Fanny von Arnstein and Sarah Levy, both lovers of music, the former the patroness of a well-known salon and the latter a skilled keyboard player in her own right. Visitors to the Mendelssohn household in the early 1820s, including Ignaz Moscheles and Sir George Smart, were equally impressed by both siblings. Much later, in an 1831 letter to Goethe, Zelter described Fanny’s skill as a pianist with the highest praise for a woman at the time: “She plays like a man.” Both Fanny and Felix received instruction in composition with Zelter starting in 1819.įanny showed prodigious musical ability as a child and began to write music. Zelter at one point favored Fanny over Felix: he wrote to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1816, in a letter introducing Abraham Mendelssohn to the poet, ‘He has adorable children and his oldest daughter could give you something of Sebastian Bach. In 1820 Fanny, along with her brother Felix, joined the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin which was led by Carl Friedrich Zelter. She studied briefly with the pianist Marie Bigot in Paris, and finally with Ludwig Berger. Thus as a thirteen year old, Fanny could already play all 24 Preludes from Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier by heart, and she did so in honor of her father’s birthday in 1818. She was not however brought up as Jewish, and never practised Judaism, though it has been suggested that she “retained the cultural values of liberal Judaism”.įanny received her first piano instruction from her mother, who had been trained in the Berliner-Bach tradition by Johann Kirnberge, who was himself a student of Johann Sebastian Bach.
She was descended on both sides from distinguished Jewish families her parents were Abraham Mendelssohn (who was the son of philosopher Moses Mendelssohn and later changed the family surname to Mendelssohn Bartholdy), and Lea, née Salomon, a granddaughter of the entrepreneur Daniel Itzig. Fanny Mendelssohn was born in Hamburg, the oldest of four children, who included the composer Felix Mendelssohn.
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