No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2011
The bicentenary year of Fanny Hensel's birth generated a welcome degree of renewed attention to her life and music. Viewing these against the backcloth of debates about the relationships between women and the culture to which they contribute (and which they also consume) suggests a tension between, on the one hand, the image of a female composer in conflict with a patriarchal order and, on the other hand, the impression of a composer for whom considerable creative power lay in the cultural environment that she inhabited. While it is true that Hensel faced social and cultural barriers because of her sex, in order to understand her music it is essential that we consider the ways in which she could be seen to overcome those barriers, or even destroy them, through the expression of her personal voice in her compositions. Hensel's life demonstrates how closely bound up together biography and aesthetics really are. The way in which her life is portrayed can be seen to colour listeners' judgement of her music.
1 Staiger, Emil, Basic Concepts of Poetics, trans. Hudson, Janette C. and Frank, Luanne T. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991): 68.Google Scholar
2 Solie, Ruth, ‘Whose life? The Gendered Self in Schumann's Frauenliebe songs’, in Music and Text: Critical Inquiries, ed. Scher, Steven Paul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992): 219–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3 Ibid.: 220.
4 Ibid.: 232.
5 The word ‘symbol’ is used here to describe the tendency in German Romantic poetry to treat ‘the actual as an expression of something underlying’ ( Schwarz, Catherine, ed., Chambers Concise Dictionary (Edinburgh: Chambers, 1997): 1082).Google Scholar
6 Arieti, Silvano, Creativity: The Magic Synthesis (New York: Basic Books, 1976): 178.Google Scholar
7 Storr, Anthony, The Dynamics of Creation (London: Secker and Warburg, 1972): 184.Google Scholar
8 Perrey, Julia Beate, Schumann's Dichterliebe and Early Romantic Poetics: Fragments of Desire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002): 6.Google Scholar Arieti, Creativity: The Magic Synthesis: 178.
10 Plaskow, udith, Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective (New York: HarperCollins, 1990): 10.Google Scholar
11 Heilbrun, Carolyn, Writing a Woman's Life (London: Women's Press, 1988): 120.Google Scholar
12 Meskimmon, Marsha, Women Making Art: History, Subjectivity, Aesthetics (London: Routledge, 2003): 39.Google Scholar
13 Heilbrun, , Writing a Woman's Life: 11.Google Scholar
14 Hensel, Sebastian, The Mendelssohn Family (1729–1847) from Letters and Journals, trans. Klingemann, Carl Jr [] (London: Sampson Low, Marston Searle & Rivington, 1881): vol. I, 80.Google Scholar
15 Ibid.: vol. I, 82–3.
16 Citron, Marcia J., The Letters of Fanny Hensel to Felix Mendelssohn, Collected, Edited and Translated with Introductory Essays and Notes (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1987): 349.Google Scholar
17 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Stuttgart: Reklam Verlag, 1982): 149.Google Scholar
18 Hensel, Sebastian, The Mendelssohn Family: vol. I, 111.Google Scholar
19 Hensel, Sebastian, The Mendelssohn Family: vol. II, 31.Google Scholar
20 See Arieti, Creativity: The Magic Synthesis, passim for a discussion of different theorists' breakdowns of the stages of the creative process.
21 Ibid.: 63.