Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Fanny

Fanny Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, German composer and pianist, 1805-1847

Fanny Mendelssohn, after her marriage, Fanny Hensel, was a German composer and pianist from the Romantic era. Her brother Felix Mendelssohn, also a composer and pianist, shared the same education and the two developed a close relationship. Due to the reservations of her family, and to social conventions of the time about the roles of women, a number of her works were published under her brother's name in his Opus 8 and 9 collections. In 1846, despite the continuing ambivalence of her family towards her musical ambitions, Fanny Hensel published a collection of songs as her Opus 1. She composed over 460 pieces of music, most of which went unpublished in her lifetime.