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Genre, Romanticism and Female Authorship: Fanny Hensel's ‘Scottish’ Sonata in G Minor (1843)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2011

Matthew Head
Matthew Head
Affiliation:
King's College, London
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Extract

The year 1846 was a watershed for Fanny Hensel: in that year she published collections of music in her own name. Felix Mendelssohn, withholding personal approval of his sister's decision to go public, nonetheless acknowledged a change of status when he offered his ‘professional blessing upon your decision to enter our guild’. This much is well known, but the decision to publish was one of several signs that in the 1840s Hensel sought to set her life-long cultivation of composition on a more formal and professional footing. With her Piano Sonata in G minor (autumn 1843) she tackled a genre largely off-limits to earlier female composers in northern Germany. The genre involved extended instrumental forms and Hensel was alternately confident and full of doubts about her abilities in this area. In a letter to her brother concerning her String Quartet, she pictured herself trapped in the ‘emotional and wrenching’ (‘rührend u. eindringlich’) style of late Beethoven. Countering her brother's criticisms of the quartet she asserted, ambivalently, that she did not lack ‘the compositional skill’ (‘die Schreibart’) to succeed so much as ‘a certain vital force’ (‘ein gewisses Lebensprinzip’) and the ‘strength to sustain my ideas and give them the necessary consistency’.

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Nineteenth-Century Music Review , Volume 4 , Issue 2 , November 2007 , pp. 67 - 88
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2007

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References

* Research towards this article was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

1 Letter of 12 August 1846 from Felix to Fanny: ‘[Ich schreibe] Dir [um] meinen Handwerkssegen zu geben für Deinen Entschluß, Dich auch unter unsere Zunft zu begeben.’ In Weissweiler, Eva, ed., ‘Die Musik will gar nicht rutschen ohne Dich.’ Fanny und Felix Mendelssohn: Briefwechsel 1821 bis 1846 (Berlin: Propyläen, 1997): 393Google Scholar . For the biographical context of this letter, see Tillard, Françoise, Fanny Mendelssohn, trans. Naish, Camille (Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1996): ch. 29 (‘The First Publications’), 323–33Google Scholar.

2 This surprising fact emerges when the output of women in northern German territory is collated from Barbara Garvey Jackson's authoritative catalogue, ‘Say Can You Deny Me’: A Guide to Surviving Music by Women from the 16th through the 18th Centuries (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1994)Google Scholar . Among the few women to compose and publish keyboard sonatas in this region in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were Juliane Reichardt (née Benda) and Helene Liebmann (née Riese). The sonatas of (Eleonore) Sophia Westenholz (née Fritscher) remained unpublished and it is not unlikely that Hensel would have felt her own Sonata in G minor unprecedented among women composers.

3 ‘Es fehlt mir die Kraft, die Gedanken gehörig festzuhalten, ihnen die nöthige Consistenz zu geben.’ Letter from Fanny to Felix of 17 February 1835, cited from Weissweiler, ed., Briefwechsel: 186–8, here at 188. The translation is from Tillard, , Fanny Mendelssohn: 225 (slightly altered)Google Scholar.

4 ‘Daher gelingen mir am besten Lieder, wozu nur allenfalls ein hübscher Einfall ohne viel Kraft der Durchführung gehört.’ Weissweiler, ed., Briefwechsel: 188; Tillard, , Fanny Mendelssohn: 225 (translation slightly altered)Google Scholar.

5 On the background to the Sunday concerts or ‘musicales’ (Sonntagsmusiken) see, among other sources, Tillard, , Fanny Mendelssohn: ch. 17, 197–206Google Scholar . For a new reappraisal of the notion of Hensel as hosting a musical salon, see Beatrix Borchard and Cornelia Bartsch, ‘“Leipziger Straβe Drei”: Sites for Music’, pp. 119–38 in this issue.

6 On Hensel's misgivings about virtuosity for its own sake, see Camilla Cai, ‘Virtuoso Texture in Fanny Hensel's Piano Music’, in The Mendelssohns: Their Music in History, ed. Cooper, John Michael and Prandi, Julie D. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002): 263–77Google Scholar.

7 ‘Hochgeehrter Herr und Freund! Hierbei erfolgt das Musikstück, durch welches ich, Ihrem freundlichen Verlangen zufolge, den kühnen Versuch machen will, mich zu der Würde eines Mitgliedes Ihres Vereins aufzuschwingen. Verzeihen und rügen Sie alle darin vorkommenden weiblichen u. dilettantischen Pferdefüsse, ein Dilettant ist schon ein schreckliches Geschöpf, ein weiblicher Autor ein noch schrecklicheres, wenn aber Beides sich in einer Person vereinige, wird natürlich das allerschrecklichste Wesen entstehn …’ Cited from Eva Weissweiler, Fanny Mendelssohn: Ein Portrait in Briefen (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1985): 154Google Scholar . I am grateful to Paula Higgins for helping me to track down this letter.

8 I have not been able to resolve the discrepancy that Hensel's letter precedes by three years the date given in New Grove for Hauser's appointment as director of the Munich conservatory. See John Warrack and Douglass Seaton, ‘Franz Hauser’, in Sadie, Stanley and Tyrrell, John, eds, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd rev. edn, 29 vols (London: Macmillan, 2001): vol. 11, 146Google Scholar : ‘In 1846 he was appointed director of the newly founded Munich Conservatory.’

9 Schumann, Robert, Gesammelte Schriften über Musik und Musiker, 5th edn, 2 vols, ed. Kreisig, Martin (Leipzig: Reclam, 1914): vol. 1, 395Google Scholar . The translation is cited from Newman, William S., The Sonata Since Beethoven, 3rd edn (New York: Norton, 1983): 38Google Scholar.

10 One recurrent idea is the descending scale. This underwrites the upper voice of the first theme of the first movement, bars 2–4 (where it is disguised by octave displacement and the omission of C natural); is met in the B major [trio] section of the Scherzo (bars 37–38); is presented at the beginning of the third movement ‘proper’, that is, bars 10–11 of the section headed adagio, and is stated jubilantly in the bass of the finale almost in the manner of a peal of church bells (bars 72–73, 82–85 and 181–184).

11 The autograph resides in the Mendelssohn archives (Ms 48) of the Staatsbibliothek Preuβischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin. The sonata is published by Furore (edition 146) as Fanny Hensel-Mendelssohn , Sonate g-Moll, ed. Serbescu, Liana Gavrila and Heller, Barbara (Kassel: Furore, 1991)Google Scholar : on the autograph, see Serbescu and Heller's editorial preface, p. 4.

12 On her earlier sonata compositions see ‘Gender-Based Genre Choices’, on pp. 71–2.

13 McClary, Susan, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991): 18.Google Scholar

14 The most comprehensive account to date is found in Kallberg, Jeffrey, Chopin at the Boundaries: Sex, History, and Musical Genre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996): chs 1, 2 and 5, esp. ch. 1, n. 2, 231–2Google Scholar.

15 Citron, Marcia J., Gender and the Musical Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993): 145–59Google Scholar (with reference to Cécile Chaminade's Sonata op. 21) ; Kallberg, , Chopin at the Boundaries: 49–61Google Scholar (with reference to nocturnes by Clara Wieck and Fanny Hensel); and McClary, , Feminine Endings: chs 4–6Google Scholar (with reference to Janika Vandervelde, Laurie Anderson and Madonna).

16 On the first notion of genre see Dubrow, Heather, Genre (London: Methuen, 1982): 115Google Scholar , and on the second see Citron, , Gender and the Musical Canon, ‘Music as Gendered Process’: 120–64Google Scholar ; and Kallberg, Chopin at the Boundaries: ch. 2, 30–61Google Scholar.

17 Hans-Günter Klein, ‘Similarities and Differences in the Artistic Development of Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy in a Family Context: Observations Based on the Early Berlin Autograph Volumes’, trans. Prandi, Julie D., in Cooper, and Prandi, , eds, The Mendelssohns: Their Music in History: 233–43 (at 243)Google Scholar.

18 Ibid.

19 The works and dates in this paragraph are derived from Ibid.: 242. The lost Sonata in F major (mentioned by Hensel in a letter to her brother of 29 October 1821) is listed in Renate Hellwig-Unruh's thematic catalogue (104–5) as item 43. The Sonata movement in E major is item 44 (105). See Hellwig-Unruh, R., Fanny Hensel geb. Mendelssohn Bartholdy: Thematisches Verzeichnis der Kompositionen (Adliswil: Edition Kunzelmann, 2000)Google Scholar . Several other incomplete, lost and ambiguously titled works might be considered in a study of Hensel's sonatas: the single movement Sonata o Capriccio für Klavier in f-Moll (February 1824: Hellwig-Unruh, , Thematisches Verzeichnis, 144–5, no. 113)Google Scholar ; the lost Ostersonate (early 1829): ibid.: 211–12, no. 235), and the incomplete Sonata für Klavier in Es-Dur (October–November 1829: ibid.: 222–3, no. 246). The existing literature on Hensel's piano sonatas is small and of slight relevance to the present study. See principally Annegret Huber, ‘Anmerkungen zu “Schreibart” und “Lebensprinzip” einiger Sonatenhauptsätze von Fanny Hensel’, in Fanny Hensel, geb. Mendelssohn Bartholdy: Das Werk, ed. Helmig, Martina (Munich: edition text + kritik, 1997): 93–104Google Scholar ; and Nubbemeyer, Annette, ‘Die Klaviersonaten Fanny Hensels. Analytische Betrachtungen’, in Fanny Hensel geb. Mendelssohn Bartholdy. Komponieren zwischen Geselligkeitsideal und romantischer Musikästhetik, ed. Borchard, Beatrix and Schwarz-Danuser, Monika (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999): 90–119CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Newman, , The Sonata Since Beethoven: 61.Google Scholar

21 Ibid.: 38.

22 Ibid.: 85.

23 Ibid.: 40.

24 Ibid.: 57. See also Ritterman, Janet and Weber, William, ‘Origins of the Piano Recital in England, 1830–1870’, in The Piano in Nineteenth-Century British Culture, ed. Ellsworth, Therese and Wollenberg, Susan (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007): ch. 8Google Scholar.

25 On Mendelssohn's visit to Goethe see Todd, R. Larry, Mendelssohn: A Life in Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003): 83–9Google Scholar.

26 On Felix Mendelssohn and tutelage see Kramer, Lawrence, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995)Google Scholar : ch. 6 (‘The Lied as Cultural Practice’), 143–73.

27 Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) was first translated into German by Christian Garve as Burkes philosophische Untersuchungen über den Ursprung unsrer Begriffe vom Erhabnen und Schönen. Nach der fünften englischen Ausgabe (Riga: Hartknoch, 1773)Google Scholar . Widely read in Germany, in both English and German, the Philosophical Enquiry is often cited as a major influence on both G.E. Lessing and I. Kant.

28 Burnham, Scott, Beethoven Hero (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).Google Scholar

29 Czerny, Carl, School of Practical Composition [c. 1840], op. 600, trans. Bishop, John, 3 vols (London: R. Cocks, 1848)Google Scholar ; Reicha, Anton, Traité de haute composition musicale, 2 vols (Paris: Zetter, 1824–1826)Google Scholar ; Marx, Adolph Bernhard, Die Lehre von der musikalischen Komposition, 4 vols (Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1837, 1838, 1845, 1847)Google Scholar , vol. 1. My reference here to a lack of agency reflects Marx's formulation of the second theme as ‘conditioned and determined by the preceding theme, and as such its essence is necessarily milder, its formation one of pliancy rather than pith – a feminine counterpart, as it were, to its masculine precedent’. However, Marx's thinking about the nature of the second theme was complex and even contradictory. See Burnham, Scott, ‘A.B. Marx and the Gendering of Sonata Form’, in Music Theory in the Age of Romanticism, ed. Bent, Ian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996): 163–86 (with the quotation above at 165)Google Scholar.

30 Newman, , Sonata Since Beethoven: 115, with reference to Schubert.Google Scholar

31 See Richards, Annette, The Free Fantasia and the Musical Picturesque (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).Google Scholar

32 Here I follow Annegret Huber who (presumably on the basis of the modulation to B minor) locates the start of the development section at bar 45. See Huber, ‘Sonatenhauptsätze von Fanny Hensel’: 98.

33 It must suffice here to cite three foundational studies of idealism in German music of the early nineteenth century: Linda Siegel, ed. and trans., Music in German Romantic Literature (Novato, CA: Elra Publications, 1983)Google Scholar ; Bonds, Mark Evan, ‘Idealism and the Aesthetics of Instrumental Music at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 50/2–3 (summer–autumn 1997): 387–420CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; and Franke, Lars, ‘Music as Daemonic Voice in later Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century German Culture’, PhD diss. (Southampton, 2005)Google Scholar.

34 Annette Nubbemeyer, ‘Italienerinnerungen im Klavieroeuvre Fanny Hensels: Das verschwiegene Programm im Klavierzyklus Das Jahr’, in Helmig, ed., Fanny Hensel: Das Werk: 68–80.

35 Continuity between the first and second movements is further enhanced by the use of this same accented B♭ in the alto voice at the opening of the Scherzo. In Schenkerian terms, this pitch is the chromatically raised primary tone, B, that is a focal point of both the primary and secondary themes in the first movement.

36 Todd, R. Larry, ‘Mendelssohn's Ossianic Manner, with a New Source – On Lena's Gloomy Heath’, in Mendelssohn and Schumann: Essays on Their Music and Its Context, ed. Finson, Jon W. and Todd, R. Larry (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1984): 137–60Google Scholar (at 140). See also Daverio, John, ‘Schumann's Ossianic Manner’, 19th-Century Music 21/3 (spring 1998): 247–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Further research might explore the possibility, suggested to me in conversation by the Verdi scholar Marian Read, that the trio section evokes the supernatural. Read notes that ‘Scotland was connected in 19th-century minds with ghosts, the supernatural and the eerie. Harp accompaniments in operas on Scottish subjects such as La Dame blanche (Boieldieu, 1825)Google Scholar and Lucia di Lammermoor (Donizetti, 1835)Google ScholarPubMed are connected with the appearance of female ghosts’ (private communication of 2 October 2005).

38 Fiske, Roger, Scotland in Music: A European Enthusiasm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983): ch. 2, 31–54.Google Scholar

39 Todd, , ‘Mendelssohn's Ossianic Manner’: 139.Google Scholar

40 Thomas Schmidt-Beste, ‘Just how “Scottish” is the “Scottish” Symphony? Thoughts on Poetic Content and Form in Mendelssohn's Opus 56’, in Cooper, and Prandi, , eds, The Mendelssohns: Their Music in History: 147–65Google Scholar.

41 Todd, , ‘Mendelssohn's Ossianic Manner’: 146.Google Scholar

42 At this tempo the third movement might also suggest a Barcarolle in 9/8. For Keillor's recording see Elaine Keillor, ‘Views of the Piano Sonata’, Carlton Sound CSD-1002 (1998).

43 Newman, , The Sonata Since Beethoven: 214.Google Scholar

44 The movement from B minor (i) to D major (III) across the second to third movements possibly relates to a harmonic topos identified by Balázs Mikusi in Felix Mendelssohn's music associated with, on the one hand, Scottish freedom and primitivism and, on the other, ‘texts about farewell, wandering, absence, or distance’. See ‘Mendelssohn's “Scottish” Tonality?’, 19th-Century Music 29/3 (spring 2006): 240–60Google Scholar (at 245). At its most immediate, this topos involves a brief and abrupt modulation from the tonic minor to the relative major and back, but, as Mikusi suggests, it can operate over larger musical spans. In Hensel's sonata the modulation from B minor to D major for the beginning of the third movement is not ‘completed’ by a return to B minor (unless we over-invest in the evaded cadence in B minor in bars 14–15). Instead, the drama of the return of the first movement within the third movement comes to the fore. Mikusi's emphasis on modulation in considering the representation of Scotland is inspired by Daverio, ‘Schumann's Ossianic Manner’.

45 Thackeray's novel was not published until 1847, and in the private communication cited above, Marian Read suggests to me that Hensel may have been thinking of a passage from Byron's Childe Harold. Whether or not consciously modelled on ‘The Eve of Waterloo’, the technique employed by Hensel is the same as Byron's, first establishing a context of joyful social dance, then introducing battle sounds faintly; these are dismissed, only to return more forcefully. ‘The Eve of Waterloo’ from Byron's Childe Harold begins: ‘There was a sound of revelry by night, / And Belgium's capital had gathered then / Her Beauty and her Chivalry, and bright / The lamps shone o’er fair women and brave men, / A thousand hearts beat happily; and when / Music arose with its voluptuous swell, / Soft eyes looked love to eyes which spake again, / And all went merry as a marriage bell; / But hush! Hark! A deep sound strikes like a rising knell! //

Did ye not hear it? –No; ‘twas but the wind, / Or the car rattling o’er the stony street; / On with the dance! Let joy be unconfined; / No sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet / To chase the glowing hours with flying feet – / But hark! – that heavy sound breaks in once more, / As if the clouds its echo would repeat; / And nearer, clearer, deadlier than before! / Arm! Arm! It is – it is – the cannon's opening roar! /

46 Newman, , The Sonata Since Beethoven: 283 and 286–7.Google Scholar

47 McClary, Feminine Endings, passim.

48 On the distinction between absolute music and earlier nineteenth-century idealism – a distinction elided in Dahlhaus, Carl, The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Lustig, Roger L. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989)Google Scholar – see Bonds, ‘Idealism and the Aesthetics of Instrumental Music’.

49 ‘The musical culture [Felix] absorbed from his family was transmitted through the work and talent of important women, especially his great-aunt, Sara Levy, as well as his sister … Music in the family sphere meant the promise of cultural dialogue. Felix and Fanny were educated musically in and for the household; when Felix exercised his male priority to take his music into the public sphere – an option denied Fanny – he translated a domestic, and in a specific sense a female, discourse into a public and male one … Felix reproduced musically his family's culture of negotiation and dialogue through music, eschewing a musical discourse of heroism and assertion in favour of one of enlightened conversation.’ Michael P. Steinberg, ‘Culture, Gender, and Music: A Forum on the Mendelssohn Family’, Musical Quarterly 77 (1993): 648–50 (at 649)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50 Battersby, Christine, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (London: Women's Press, 1989): 103Google Scholar . See also Hoeveler, Diane Long, Romantic Androgyny: The Women Within (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990)Google Scholar ; and Richardson, Alan, ‘Romanticism and the Colonization of the Feminine’, in Romanticism and Feminism, ed. Mellor, Anne K. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988): 11–25.Google Scholar

51 My use of the term ‘androgyny’ follows Battersby, Gender and Genius: 91, in referring not to ambiguous biological sex but to masculine and feminine gender within a male body. In this usage, the hermaphrodite but not the androgyne is doubly sexed.

52 A primary source close in time and place to Fanny Hensel is Schopenhauer, Arthur, The World as Will and Idea (1818; 2nd expanded edition 1844), trans. Haldane, R.B. and Kemp, J., 3 vols (London: Trübner, 1883)Google Scholar . Battersby notes that ‘there is a considerable overlap between Schopenhauer's portrait of genius and his caricature of woman. As he matures, a “genius” transcends the motivational drives and urges that are integral to masculinity and acquires feminine passivity. He belongs to a kind of third sex – the female male’. However, for Schopenhauer, women themselves were incapable of even the kind of aesthetic appreciation and consumption for which Kant deemed them suited: ‘But what is so revealing about Schopenhauer's position is that he shows how the “feminine” Romantic genius and a horror of women can, and do, coexist … For Kant the female sex was, at least, the “aesthetic” sex – with a “beautiful” mind and body compensating for the deficiency in genius’ ( Battersby, , Gender and Genius: 107)Google Scholar.