Love Mendelssohn…. which one?
Album Of The WeekFrom the Lebrecht Album of the Week:
It’s not often one gets a chance to compare two composers who are brother and sister. In fact, apart from the Mendelssohns, there is hardly another instance except Mozart and his inauspicious sister, Nannerl. In the Mendelssohn family, Fanny was the first to show talent…
Read on here.
And here.
I have a hypothesis that Fanny wrote or at least partially wrote the Mendelssohn violin concerto. Felix reportedly struggled with writing it. Perhaps Fanny got it together? My reasoning: listen to the opening of Fanny’s piano trio. Is she paying homage to her brother or is she hinting that the famous opening of the concerto was actually written by her?
An interesting hypothesis which may well be correct
Two little factoids.
Felix and his sister agreed that they liked the last name Mendelssohn and emphatically did NOT like the “Bartholdy” last name that his father adopted when the children were baptized (which, interestingly, was before the father himself officially converted to Christianity). Perhaps a reason for their dislike of Bartholdy was because the name was taken from a dairy farm the family owned!
And when Felix met Queen Victoria and Prince Albert there was much music and singing, and Victoria herself chose to sing a favorite from a published collection of Mendelssohn’s songs — but she chose one that Fanny had actually composed but was published under Felix’s name (Schöner und schöner). Felix confessed this to the Queen and begged her to sing one that he had actually composed. He wrote about all of this in an amusing letter to his mother (July 19, 1842).