Rediscovering Fanny Mendelssohn, Composer, in Documentary Film

In Wednesday’s (10/25) Guardian (U.K.), Sheila Hayman, a descendant of Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn, writes, “To read the family’s account, you’d never know that Fanny Mendelssohn, Felix’s big sister, was also a composer of genius. Her own son, my great-great-grandfather Sebastian, paints a vivid picture of her in his history of the family: funny, brilliant, affectionate. But not a word about her as a musician. So it was not until I made a film about Felix for the BBC in 2009 that I began to discover Fanny’s extraordinary gifts; and also, her lifelong struggle between a desire for self-expression and the horror of upsetting the family…. That was the start of my documentary Fanny: The Other Mendelssohn. Today, 176 years after Fanny’s death, things have moved on a lot…. Although Fanny’s musical gift was considered equal to her brother’s, when she was 14 her father Abraham abruptly ended her musical education and wrote this to her: ‘Music will perhaps become his profession, whilst for you it can and must only be an ornament, never the root of your being and doing.’ Fanny was still allowed to compose and perform, but only in private. And yet inconveniently, she turned out to have a talent so enormous it spilled over into everything she did.”