The Mendelssohn family’s handling of the compositional legacy of the two siblings Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn, who died young, could not have been more different: While the brother Paul Mendelssohn put almost everything his brother had left behind into print posthumously, very little was given to the public in the case of the sister. On the one hand, this family strategy reflected the father Abraham Mendelssohn’s assessment of his children’s talents and professional abilities. On the other hand, these decisions distorted the image of the developments and abilities of both artists for a long time. The article traces this development, in particular the role of Cécile Mendelssohn, who as a widow was unable to assert herself against this family dynamic.

This chapter discusses modern approaches to understanding Hensel’s music and future scholarly challenges for its interpretation. Nowadays Hensel’s music is written about and performed widely and she has become one of the best-known woman composers. Yet this was not always the case. What had to happen to transform Hensel – in the eyes of scholars, performers, students and lay listeners – from an overlooked and sometimes maligned figure into someone now regarded as one of the most gifted composers of her generation? What lessons can we learn from considering how she moved from the margins toward the centre of the canon? And what challenges lie ahead? Looking back on the past forty years of Hensel studies reveals three main, interlinked developments that have shaped our understanding of her music: a greater awareness of the relationship and differences between her and her brother’s musical styles; a more sophisticated analytical understanding of her music; and a drastic increase in the amount of her music available for study.

Part of Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s ‘monarchical project’ following his ascension to the throne in 1840 included his goal of establishing Berlin as a leading centre of culture and the arts on par with other European capitals. Berlin had remained Fanny Hensel’s home throughout her life, where her musical salon formed one of the city’s cultural highlights. In the 1840s, at the urging of the king, her brother gave Berlin another chance; his appointment at the Prussian court brought him closer to his family once more, but placed different expectations on him, not least in the composition of new genres for the court (incidental music, liturgical music). Ultimately Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s project must be judged something of a political failure, while Mendelssohn left after an unsatisfactory and frustrating period. Yet while neither Hensel nor Mendelssohn lived long enough to witness the revolutionary upheaval of 1848, each in their own way played an important role in shaping the contours of everyday life in Berlin of the 1840s.

This chapter explores what is surely one of the core questions of the entire volume - how did Fanny and Felix interact as musicians and as composers? Both displayed prodigious musical talent at an early age, and both received a parallel musical education, but social and class boundaries dictated that Felix shuld become a professional composer while Fanny was destined to remain in the domestic spheres. This also largely dictated the genres in which they went on to compose. The chapter also considers convergences and divergences in compositional style.

The number of leading intellectual lights with whom the Mendelssohns came into contact were quite remarkable, and often exerted a lasting impression on their artistic outlook. This chapter reviews some of the figures who belonged to Fanny’s and Felix’s circles. A discussion of the figures in whose worlds they moved as they developed distinct personalities, talents and outlooks up to 1828 is followed by examinations of the dramatically expanded circles of the two siblings, each in their respective spheres, between 1829 and 1840. It closes with a discussion of their respective circles of fame and influence in the last eight years of their lives and a few comments on the ways in which the acknowledged brilliance they enjoyed during their lifetimes was threatened in the years after their deaths.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the family remained the overarching frame of reference for the individual, especially for German-Jewish families. Over generations, marriages consolidated the family threads into a dense network of relationships. The Mendelssohn family can be considered a prime example in this context. This also applies to the nuclear family, which represents only a small section of the Mendelssohn family cosmos, albeit one that is crucial to the family’s self-image. Fanny, Felix, Rebecka and Paul Mendelssohn were aware that they had been born into an extraordinary family. They were also aware that the female members were assigned different social responsibilities than the male members and that these responsibilities were intended to complement each other. All four of them followed the path intended for them.

This chapter examines Fanny’s and Felix’s economic and social relationships with their music publishers, focussing mainly on Felix. Fanny published only a few works late in her life under her own name, which were not widely sold. Building on the premise that relations between composers and publishers were mutually beneficial in the nineteenth century, the chapter summarises the most relevant of Felix’s collaborations with publishers from Germany, England, France and Italy respectively, and their role in the dissemination of his music. To contextualise these relationships properly, the chapter considers both the popularity and potential profitability of Felix’s works as well as his preference for business relations built on trust and respect.

Based on an evaluation of extensive primary and secondary sources, ’Gendered Journeys’ interprets, through the lens of gender studies and in relation to the tradition of ’Bildungsreisen’, the impact of Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn’s European travels on their artistic creativity.  Their respective trips to Rome were especially important.  Italy inspired them both to increasing self-reflection, and to further personal and professional development.  Nevertheless, the opportunities and experiences offered to each of them were significantly different, owing to the relatively strict delineation of gender roles during the nineteenth century, but also to their personal choices.

Mendelssohn’s ten visits to England made the country easily his most important foreign destination. Although he was consistently feted by British audiences both as composer and performer, he privately expressed dissatisfaction with the state of music making he encountered, which compared unfavourably in many respects with that in Germany, especially with regard to rehearsals. Nevertheless, he kept on returning, in part because it provided a truly international shop window for his major new works. He was also honest enough to admit enjoying his reception, while he was also able to renew the many personal friendships he formed over the years. At the same time, his early death can be attributed in part to the exhaustion caused by his incessant activity during his final visits to the country, which was posthumously set to honour him publicly more than Germany.

Mendelssohn’s correspondence, the most extensive of any composer up to his time, has always provided essential material for both his biography and study of the music. Fortunately, not only has a high proportion of probably around 6,500 letters survived – helped by their quality as well as the elegance of his script, which invited preservation – but they are importantly complemented by his own careful retention of incoming correspondence. The letters fall into three main groups: some 700 addressed to his family, regular communication with a small number of close friends, and those concerning his professional activities, including publication of his works. The story of the posthumous publication of his letters is traced, which culminated in the recent complete edition of them; this was only made possible thanks to many letters emerging from private ownership into publicly accessible archives since the Second World War.

The circles of friendship within which Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn moved during their childhood and youth very much revolved around the family; to a large degree their early friends (often slightly older) were selected or encouraged by their parents according to how they might contribute to their personal or intellectual growth. Not a few of these friends shared the children’s passion for music, such as Ignaz Moscheles, Eduard Ritz (or Rietz), Ferdinand David, Eduard Devrient, and Adolf Bernhard Marx, but also included academics, lawyers and artists (notably Fanny’s husband-to-be, Wilhelm Hensel). The physical and spiritual centre of all these friendships was the family home in the Leipziger Strasse 3, the closest group of friends and their relaxed, cheerful and witty intercourse symbolised by Wilhelm Hensel’s drawing Das Rad (‘the Wheel’) with Felix at its centre.

The hive of activity in nineteenth-century salons, especially those of Jewish women in Berlin, was the formative ground in which both Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn’s engagement with literature ostensibly developed. In such circles song as social document and song as a semi-confessional art were contexts that were as vibrant then as they are today. The classical and European contemporary poets who captured both siblings’ musical imagination serve as portals to their shared world and at the same time offer a strong conceptual sense of each individual self. It was, however, in the private salon of their own home where their poetic genius took root. Two literary traditions within their family circle – Moses Mendelssohn and Goethe, who was profoundly influenced by their grandfather’s writing and with whom both artists were personally acquainted –- offers a unique key to understanding Fanny and Felix’s literary inheritance and how each expressed themselves creatively.

This chapter illuminates the social relations of Felix and Fanny with fellow musicians and the functions both fulfilled in these networks. It shows how the siblings were central actors, at first in the mutual Berlin network; later in their respective semi-public (Fanny) and professional (Felix) music networks. The chapter describes some of the more important relations both had with the ‘greats’ of their time. At the same time, it is also pointed out that both rarely became close friends with fellow musicians after the Berlin years, which might be a result of three factors: The siblings’ social status, their confidence in their musical education, and their classically trained aesthetics. Felix also might have been suspicious of conflicts between professional and private interests. The few special connections both had with contemporaries (Fanny: Gounod, Bousquet, Keudell; Felix: Rietz, Moscheles) warrant special attention.

In developing their children’s cultural sensibilities, Abraham and Leah Mendelssohn Bartholdy emphasised the role of the visual arts. The parents not only instilled in their offspring an appreciation for all schools of European painting, they also encouraged engagement with living practitioners – visiting galleries, exhibitions, and studios. For Fanny, an important outcome of this exposure was her marriage to a professional artist, one whose artistic strengths proved well suited to embellishing manuscripts of his wife’s songs. For Felix, who also married an (amateur) painter, early recognition of his talent for drawing resulted in a lifelong preoccupation, one that at times took precedence over musical activities. His practice of drawing, especially landscapes observed from life, offered respite from the demands of professional life and opportunities for sensing achievement that otherwise often proved elusive. More importantly, artistic practice informed his musical pursuits by suggesting topics, materials and perspectives that helped shape compositional principles.

The future of Mendelssohn and Hensel studies holds out some exciting prospects. What might be the most profitable directions to take, and what are the ongoing challenges that still face scholarly scrutiny? Taking bearings from this volume’s final section on reception and placing the preceding book as a whole ‘in context’ of the present and its concerns, this brief epilogue looks to the two siblings’ current standing in scholarship and public perception, summing up the state of research from the last couple of decades, identifying some persisting ideological problems that require addressing, and outlining some possible future directions that might be taken.

Felix Mendelssohn’s departure from Berlin in 1833 necessarily changed the dynamics of friendship, with the family home remaining the focal point for Fanny Hensel (sometimes to her frustration) while Felix established new networks of friends on his travels – in London in particular – and in his new home in Leipzig. Some of the old friends remained close, such as Karl Klingemann and Ignaz Moscheles (in London) or Ferdinand David (in Leipzig), others receded into the background, such as Adolf Bernhard Marx and Ferdinand Hiller, while new ones emerged, most intriguingly that with the ’Swedish nightingale’ Jenny Lind. Fanny, meanwhile, retained many of the friendships of her youth, some of them shared with Felix, and took advantage of her own travels to Italy to forge a few new ones, notably with Charles Gounod in Rome.

The posthumous reception of the life and works of Felix Mendelssohn differs from that of any other composer of his generation. The unique esteem and admiration he experienced during his lifetime, especially in Germany and England, changed into a more ambivalent or critical evaluation, often tinged with anti-Semitic ressentiments. In a musical culture that valued progress, genius and nationalist narratives, he was increasingly sidelined by music writers and composers because of his stylistic choices, his perceived embodiment of bourgeois values and his cosmopolitanism, despite his continued popularity with performers and audiences. Mendelssohn’s reception reached its nadir when his works were banned in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945. Since then, interest in the composer has increased, supported by scholarly editions of his works and letters, and his symphonies, concert overtures and oratorios are performed consistently, although his choral music and piano pieces have suffered from the decline in amateur music-making.

This chapter explores the “joint” musical education of the two siblings Fanny and Felix, taking as its point of departure the educational backgrounds of the parents which differentiated little by gender in terms of approach and content, but certainly in the intended paths for the two children. Felix was destined to become a professional composer, and the genres in which he was groomed were thus the “public” ones (opera in particular) while Fanny was expected to excel in the “small” genres: piano pieces and songs.

The Mendelssohns were active at a time of contestation and change within music aesthetics and broader aesthetic theory. As well as outlining how they positioned themselves in relation to some of the key issues and debates of their time, the chapter examines their continuing investment in Enlightenment and classical aesthetic ideals and how this interacted with their engagement with Romanticism. It also explores the extent to which moral and aesthetic criteria are entwined in their judgements of contemporary music, fuelling their hostility towards French grand opera, the programmatic orchestral works of Berlioz, and French virtuoso pianism. Their own compositions frequently function as music-aesthetic interventions, aiming to counterbalance trends in musical life that they viewed negatively. Crucial is a discussion of the conceptions of truth and emotion at the heart of Felix’s aesthetics, explored through a comparison of his views with those of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher.

This chapter explores the extraordinarily close relationship between the two eldest Mendelssohn siblings, the challenges and occasional tensions between them, especially following Fanny’s marriage after which their ways separated. The two had access to the same economic status, social circle, educational opportunities, and entertainment, but their paths were largely determined long before they were born. Fanny and Felix provide a salient example of how gender above all else can determine the outcomes of an otherwise identical entry into the world. Contexts for the choices their parents made can be drawn from their family history; the results of those choices can be observed in how the relationship between Fanny and Felix formed and transformed from their years as students, to emerging composers, and then correspondents when their relationship was carried out primarily via letters.