Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel

Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel (1805–1847) was a German pianist and composer whose roughly 460 surviving works place her among the most prolific composers of the early Romantic period, even though only a small portion appeared in print during her life. Born in Hamburg into the prominent Jewish-German Mendelssohn family, granddaughter of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn and elder sister of Felix Mendelssohn, she was baptized Lutheran with her siblings as a child.

She and Felix received the same musical instruction in Berlin, studying piano with Ludwig Berger and composition with Carl Friedrich Zelter, and her abilities at the keyboard were widely noted in Berlin musical society. Their father and brother both regarded a public career as inappropriate for a woman of her social class, and several of her early songs appeared under Felix's name in his published opp. 8 and 9.

In 1829 she married the court painter Wilhelm Hensel, and from her Berlin home she ran the Sonntagsmusiken, weekly Sunday concerts at which she performed her own works and conducted choral and orchestral music for an invited audience that included Liszt and Clara Schumann.

From the early 1840s she began publishing under her own name, issuing collections of lieder and piano pieces. Her Piano Trio in D minor, op. 11, and the song cycle Das Jahr, a set of twelve character pieces representing the months of the year, are now standard concert items. She died of a stroke in May 1847 at forty-one; Felix died six months later.

The given name Fanny is an English and German pet form of Frances, the feminine of Francis, ultimately from Latin Franciscus, meaning Frenchman. Mendelssohn means "son of Mendel," a Yiddish form of Menahem. Hensel was her married surname; she signed her later works with both family names.