'Neither an angry rebel, nor a tragic victim': Excavating the legacy of Fanny Mendelssohn

Faced with a work by ‘Mendelssohn’, most of us are guilty of immediately jumping to the conclusion that it was written by the German composer, pianist, organist and conductor widely known as Felix Mendelssohn. However, decades of work by dedicated musicologists and historians now challenges this assumption, delicately unpicking the tangled veil of gender bias obscuring Felix’s sister Fanny, and her extensive catalogue of works from popular view. Documentary film Fanny: The Other Mendelssohn, released this Friday (27 October) seeks to tell Fanny’s story through the lens of the discovery and re-attribution of her Easter Sonata. Lost, found, lost again, then found and painstakingly proven to be the work of Fanny herself, the Easter Sonata forms the narrative thread of this new film by BAFTA-winning director and Mendelssohn descendant Sheila Hayman (pictured below).

Although the idea of wading through archives, to transform Fanny from eclipsed sibling to creative force in her own right seems to have all the hallmarks of an Indiana Jones-style blockbuster, bringing this story to the silver screen was a challenge. Not least because the film’s central character, despite feeling like a thoroughly modern woman, died 176 years ago. ‘Although it's a fascinating story,’ Hayman acknowledges, ‘how do you make a film about a person who died before any film or photography or recorded sound of any kind?’ Hayman had always known about her great-great-great-grandmother’s talent, but it wasn’t until just after she finished her 2010 documentary Mendelssohn, The Nazis and Me, the sister film to this latest release, that Hayman heard the story of the Easter Sonata’s rediscovery. It was the contemporary thread she needed to transport Fanny to the present day: ‘This was the thing I could point a camera at.’

Completed in 1828, the Easter Sonata was Fanny’s second sonata, composed when she was just 22 years old. ‘It was written the year after Beethoven died, when most composers were sitting on their hands and saying, “The last word has been said on sonatas.”’ Hayman says, ‘Yet here's this 22-year-old woman who sits down and writes this absolutely barnstorming piece of music with no fear at all.’ Pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason, who performs the Easter Sonata in the film, shares Hayman’s admiration: ‘It’s a very brave piece, it shows Fanny to be a dynamic and daring composer, a very expressive woman and person. It sounds like it's influenced by the time, but you also can't really compare it to another composer, it’s very much her.’

Torn between her musical talents and the domestic world, Fanny’s resilience motivated Hayman when the going got tough. ‘She wasn't an angry rebel or a tragic victim, she found ways to get around the constraints in her circumstances and the difficulties that she faced without alienating people or losing the things that mattered to her – her family and friends.’ Perfectly bridging the gap between historian and layperson, Hayman is the ideal medium for Fanny’s story. As a descendant of the Mendelssohns, she undoubtedly feels closer to Fanny than most and her extensive research gives her a deep understanding of Fanny, not just as a composer, but as a person. ‘As somebody who was a combination of a formidable intellect with a very spontaneous and passionate nature and a desire to have it all, she seemed really familiar to me. She was no respecter of status, she hated making social calls because she thought they were a complete waste of time, she hated having to wear hats because the veils got caught in her glasses. But she loved her friends and her family, and she loved having a good time. The more I found out about her, the more I loved about her.’

'Fanny was a pianist and was very passionate about music, so I definitely relate to her, but I was struck by how much less freedom she had.’ Pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason offers her take on Fanny's lost Easter Sonata in a performance for the film

The story of the Easter Sonata’s rediscovery is the stuff of mystery novels. Having surfaced in a Paris bookshop in 1970, the work was seized upon by a French publisher and record producer as a lost work by Felix Mendelssohn. He contacted pianist Éric Heidsieck with a request to perform it – ‘Well, of course,’ Hayman remarks, ‘who wouldn't want to record an unknown masterpiece by Mendelssohn?’ – but funds for the promotion of the completed recording ran out and it sank without a trace. It resurfaced in the early 2010s in the form of a cassette sent to musicologist and Mendelssohn biographer Larry Todd at Duke University, North Carolina, piquing the interest of both Todd and his then graduate student Angela R Mace. The hunt was on for the lost Easter Sonata.

Mace travelled to Paris to meet Heidsieck and view the manuscript. Instantly recognising Fanny’s handwriting, she noticed that the numbers on the pages she was looking at corresponded exactly to pages missing from a bound volume of Fanny's favourite pieces in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. She was certain this was Fanny’s lost Easter Sonata, but the work vanished, sold at auction before she could get a second look. As one of the few pieces of the puzzle which Hayman could ‘point a camera at’, the loss of the manuscript was bad news for the film: ‘We had no idea whether we'd ever find the manuscript when we started making the film, whether we would actually ever be able to bring this story to a terminus.’

The manuscript is now part of the Robert Owen Lehman Collection at New York’s Morgan Library and Museum

Undeterred, Hayman began work on the film, interviewing Mace, Heidsieck and Kanneh-Mason alongside music scholar Marcia Citron who had been on Fanny’s trail for decades, engaged in an uphill struggle to gain access to Fanny’s archives while the world of academia insisted she couldn’t be worth studying. However, once filming had already begun, Mace was contacted by a musicologist in Rochester, New York, who had been studying the manuscript since her husband had bought it in Paris. Travelling to Rochester, Mace was able to get her long-awaited second look at the manuscript, now part of the Robert Owen Lehman Collection at New York’s Morgan Library and Museum (pictured above).

The final piece of the puzzle was Kanneh-Mason’s performance of the Easter Sonata. As well as presenting the piece, Kanneh-Mason’s presence in the film serves as a direct contrast to Fanny’s life. ‘I was struck by how different life was for her than it is for me,’ she recalls. ‘Fanny was a pianist and was very passionate about music. I obviously have that in my own life as well, so I definitely relate to her. But I was struck by how much less freedom she had. I'm sure if we both met now, we wouldn't be very different as women, but making the film has made me more appreciative of how lucky we are today as women to be able to go out there and forge careers.’

‘It was just a joy working with women. Everybody just mucked in and did everything that needed to be done until the job was finished.’ Hayman employed an all-female team to work behind the scenes on the film.

The issue of gender bias looms large throughout Fanny: The Other Mendelssohn. During her lifetime Fanny was told (by society at large and by her own brother) that her musical aspirations were impossible for her to achieve as a woman, and many of her works were released under her brother’s name. This was also an issue in Hayman’s early career, she recalls: ‘When I started making films, crews were entirely male, and being a woman and trying to be a film director was much more of a challenge.’ This latest project, made by an all-female team, is a completely different story. ‘It was just a joy working with women. We all worked together, and between us we were strong enough to carry all the heavy kit. Everybody just mucked in and did everything that needed to be done until the job was finished.’

The film’s documentary format offers audiences in-depth insight, not only into Fanny’s life 200 years ago, but also into her continuing impact on today’s classical landscape. As well as performing the Sonata, Kanneh-Mason was also interviewed for the film. ‘I really wanted people to get deeply into the music and see it the way that I saw it,’ she says earnestly. ‘I want people to really get behind the curtain of the whole process of preparing the piece.’ Hayman’s vision for the film’s reception is slightly broader, and is tied into her own hopes for perceptions of women in arts. ‘I would really like it to be possible for a woman to just assert her right to be a creative artist with all the risk, uncertainty and dead ends that entails. I want to feel able to say, in the same way as men can, “this is my right. I'm going to play, I don't know where it will take me, I might have nothing to show for it, but that's what I'm going to do with my life.”’ In Hayman’s world, a talent like Fanny Mendelssohn’s would never be lost again.

Fanny: The Other Mendelssohn is a production of Dartmouth Films and Mercury Studios. it will be released in UK cinemas on 27 October. You can find your closest screening here.