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SHEILA HAYMAN: Buckingham Palace, London, 1842.

SHEILA: 'The superstar German composer, Felix Mendelssohn,

is invited here to play his famous songs.'

Schoner und schoner Schmuckt sich der Plan

Schmeichelnde Lufte Wehen mich an

Fort aus der Prosa Lasten und Muh'

SHEILA: 'The singer is Queen Victoria herself.'

Goldner die Sonne Blauer die Luft

'And the song she chooses as her favourite is called Italien.

It's a huge honour for Felix.'

Dort an dem Maishalm Schwellend von Saft

Straubt sich der Aloe Storrische Kraft

Olbaum, Cypresse Blond du, du braun

Nickt ihr wie zierliche

'But Felix has a problem.

He didn't actually write this song.

It was composed by his sister, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel.

Fanny was my great-great-great grandmother

but I knew very little about her musical genius.

Her story had been overshadowed by her brother

and overlooked by a male-dominated musical world.

But looking for clues,

I discovered she has nine Twitter accounts.

Unusual for somebody who's been dead for 175 years.

So, I realised I wasn't the only person interested in her.'

Third clap.

Roland Schmidt-Hensel in the Staatsbibliothek.

'And I discovered an army of fans

determined to rescue her from oblivion.'

They have all of these, yes. Oh, that's amazing.

ROBERT LEHMAN: Wow.

What is THAT?

Holy crap.

I've never heard anything like it.

ISATA KANNEH-MASON: I imagine her to have been

very stubborn, thinking, you know, "This is how I feel.

This is what I want to write." And not being held back

and just writing something really expressive.

'The search for Fanny took me from London to Berlin,

and Paris to New York.

And revealed the hunt for a long-lost masterpiece,

the Easter Sonata.

I discovered a story of intense sibling drama, joy and tragedy.

A woman who defied convention but dared not defy her family.

This is Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, a very modern woman,

who just happened to live two centuries ago.'

TIM PARKER-LANGSTON: Every time she sat down to write,

she was doing so in a sort of creative vacuum.

The idea of what a composer was, was exclusively male.

A composer was a man who wrote music.

She wanted to be a good wife, a good daughter,

a good sister, a good mother.

At the same time, there was this fire burning inside her,

intellectual, rigorous, critical, creative.

That is what gets me every time with Fanny.

SHEILA: 'When I began looking for Fanny,

all I had of her was this music stand

and the painting of her music room where it stood.

I realised I didn't even know what she looked like.'

Did she look like this?

Or this?

Or this?

They're all radically different from each other, these pictures.

'There were no photos in those days.

Most of the pictures we have of her are imaginary ideals,

not real people.

Including these ones,

which put her firmly in her place as her brother's support act.

Even the official portrait isn't accurate.

She was horribly short sighted.

And none of them shows her as a musician.

That side of Fanny,

as for creative women throughout history, was just painted out.

So, my job seemed clear,

to find Fanny, the musical genius,

and give her the recognition she has always deserved.

The first Mendelssohn was the famous philosopher

of the German Enlightenment, Moses.

His son Abraham had four children,

including the Mendelssohn we've all heard of, Felix.

Fanny's born in 1805 and Felix three years later.

From the start, they're inseparable.'

SARAH ROTHENBERG: She and Felix and all of the children

really took great fun in coming up with nicknames for people,

making fun of people socially.

I mean, there was tremendous laughter

and fun in the household. You get that sense all the time.

Yeah!

'But the thing that's central to both their lives is music.'

'They are two prodigies who live and breathe it together

and for the first few years they're taught together as well.

Both dreaming of their future musical careers.'

Fanny's musically brilliant and Felix is musically brilliant

but she's three years older

and of course, as children that means a lot.

So, she has almost a parental kind of relationship to Felix

with music and it's something that they developed together.

'Their father, Abraham, is a wealthy banker

who converts the family from Judaism to Christianity,

adds the Protestant surname Bartholdy,

and moves them into this enormous Berlin mansion.

All to cement the family's reputation in society.'

Their place in European society was really a new one.

The conversion from Judaism

was a way of becoming a modern European citizen.

And the family had become extremely wealthy,

so they were entering into a social world

that Jews were not frequently in before.

And so, as a result, they were extremely careful

about what was proper, what was not proper.

Es fallt ein Stern herunter

Aus seiner funkelnden Hoh

'What's proper for young ladies at this time is 'Lieder,'

lyrical songs with keyboard accompaniment,

that Fanny and her sister Rebecka, a singer,

can perform in private,

without damaging the family's reputation.

So from the beginning,

this is where Fanny pours her creative energies.'

Fanny, as a child,

really wanted to fulfil the ideals of her father,

of her brother, of what it meant to be a woman.

She always wanted to please, always wanted to succeed.

She presents a composition of a song

to Abraham for his birthday.

I think she internalises all of this.

PARKER-LANGSTON: I'm going to begin where she did.

This is her first known composition

and this is essentially her version of "Happy Birthday".

It's quite different.

I'm going to just sing to you the first section of that.

'But as Fanny enters her teens,

she begins to be excluded from Felix's musical education.

And when she's 14, her father writes her a letter

making clear that her future is to be very different

from her brother's.'

"Music will perhaps become his profession,

while for you it can and must be only an ornament,

never the foundation of your life.

Your joy when he is praised

proves that you might, in his place,

have deserved the same approval.

Stay true to these values and this behaviour.

They are feminine.

And only the truly feminine is appropriate to women."

Abraham at this point is saying to her,

from now on she is not going to have the same life as Felix,

she is going to be a woman,

she's going to do things that women do.

She is allowed to cheer him on

and she's probably allowed to help him,

but she's not allowed to have a career in music.

She's terrified of her father because he's a German father,

and she's a young lady and because the year is 1819.

And you do not go against your father's wishes.

'She won't defy her father.

But, even at 14, she won't give up composing either.

This is the beginning of a balancing act

that will last all Fanny's life.

But at that time,

music by women wasn't thought to have any value.

So what survives was buried in archives

or forgotten in attics.

Until the 1970s,

when a new generation of feminist scholars

went looking for traces of Fanny.'

MARCIA CITRON: She fascinated me.

I got very interested in her, the quality of her music.

I knew that there was a lot there

that hadn't been looked at

at the Staatsbibliothek,

at what was then West Berlin.

And when I went to the library, it was a shock.

There was a functionary who was there at the table

and I had the feeling talking to him

that he had just about no respect for me.

Women were not studied much at that point,

he hadn't encountered anybody who was interested in Fanny Hensel.

She wasn't important. She was nothing like Felix.

I did have the feeling there was a whole lot more

in the way of other kinds of material,

letters, diaries,

but there was no way to know what was there.

What he said I could do is copy out by hand in pencil.

That summer I copied out maybe 12 or 15 songs.

And so, the next summer I went back.

Let's see.

I got about 50 more songs.

How long did that take you?

Oh, I don't know, weeks, weeks and weeks.

Three or four weeks I was there.

But how did it feel to be the first person

for maybe 140 years to actually be interested?

It must have been extraordinary. It was extraordinary.

I think, probably, though, I was so focused on,

"I need to get this done."

'50 years on,

Marcia's pioneering work remained unfinished

and Fanny largely unknown

until one young singer took up the challenge.'

I'm ashamed to say that, before 2020,

I actually had never heard of Fanny as a person,

as a composer.

She wasn't someone that I was even aware existed

until the lockdown.

And it was during that time I started looking at composers

whose songs had maybe been less well known

and I began with her brother, Felix.

But I then read about this elder sister, Fanny,

who had written nearly 250 songs.

And it was within a couple of minutes

of being sat at the piano with one of her scores,

I was absolutely blown away.

It wasn't long until I discovered that nearly 100 songs

there still weren't scores available in print.

So I decided that that was what my task was going to be,

to get them all out there

so that would never be the case again.

This is the first one, so you have three titles.

Wow, amazing.

I can help you load up if you wish.

Yeah, thank you very much, let's do it.

Yeah, we're good. We're gonna be good.

Huzzah.

Purpose made. Yeah.

Fits in.

It's a lot of music.

I think there's something about

this being an actual object, an artefact.

The only kind of remnants we have of Fanny's musical life

are a handful of letters and diaries

and then her original manuscripts.

And this is hopefully

an immortalising of those quite fragile things

into something you can hold in your hands.

I mean, this is just a third of them.

And it's just amazing to think

how many reams of paper she has filled with ideas

in a relatively short creative life.

It's pretty amazing to see, pretty amazing to see.

'Fanny's musical voice first emerged with the songs in Berlin.

Her personality lay hidden in another treasure trove.

Her letters to Felix,

all preserved in a collection known as the Green Books

in the Bodleian Library in Oxford,

which today are being carefully restored.'

CITRON: The summer of 1980,

I decided I needed to go to Oxford.

And the tone was so...

forthcoming and helpful.

I have here one of the three boxes,

where there are probably in here maybe 60 or so letters.

I was looking through the letters

and I found them absolutely fascinating.

It was getting inside the mind and the emotions, the voice,

of a very talented and bright and musical woman

in the past.

And it was breathtaking.

FANNY: "I couldn't write to you last week

because I was too busy practising your rondo.

Yesterday it was officially launched

with an accompaniment of double quartet and double bass.

I was so enthusiastic about the piece

that I was mad enough to play it twice

in spite of a bad cough and a weak body."

CITRON: One can feel like a snoop.

What is the distance between yourself

and the historical subject?

So I worked on this over several years.

This took quite a bit of time.

And so finally, this brick came out.

And I'm very, very proud of it.

This is the first time that we hear Fanny's voice

in a very intimate and full way through these letters.

"Yesterday, we went all out for Mozart's birthday.

You see how musical we are.

The symphony in G major went down very well.

What a brilliant, lively work.

But the vocal pieces weren't well chosen

and the pianist played a not very beautiful concerto.

Not very beautifully."

'Fanny and Felix's entangled creative lives

seeded a musical mystery that only surfaced 150 years later

when acclaimed French concert pianist, Eric Heidsieck,

was contacted by a music publisher with an exciting offer.'

ERIC HEIDSIECK: That was in '71.

I received a phone call from a record company,

a French record company, Cassiopee.

He said, "We have a manuscript of a sonata by Mendelssohn

who has never been played by nobody.

Will you be interested to make the first recording?"

I said, "Of course. I would like to see the manuscript."

'At this point, most people had never heard of Fanny.

So it was assumed to be a lost work by Felix Mendelssohn.'

Beautiful work.

I think that, really, the first movement is perfect.

KANNEH-MASON: I stretch a lot.

So normally every, probably, half an hour

I tend to get up and I just stretch.

Then, I tend to put my leg on the stool.

I already feel more loose and relaxed and flexible.

And then, when I sit down the next bit of practice can start.

'In June, 2022,

the brilliant young pianist, Isata Kanneh-Mason,

sat down for the first time

with a new edition of the Easter Sonata,

in preparation for its world premiere performance.

I was first drawn to the first movement.

Well, I thought it sounded very spring like,

which is very fitting with the title Easter Sonata.

There's lots of hymn-like stuff in the piece.

I see that it has four movements and...

it looks like the first movement's not too difficult

but the ending might be a bit tricky.

So I'd already be making a mental note of that.

I'll probably first do the beginning

just because understanding the opening phrase,

it sets up the premise for the whole movement.

("Easter Sonata")

So this chord feels like an arrival,

which means after that I'd want to have more movement

and fall away from it. So I would want to go...

You want to have a quiet singing cantabile sound.

So the weight doesn't come from...

banging the fingers down more.

It's more the shoulders and the arms.

They push the weight into the keys

and so that's how I get more sound.

So I just work through each phrase like that,

really working out where the harmony's going

because for me that's the only way to make sense

of the dialogue of the piece.

'In 1823, the 16-year-old Fanny

meets and falls in love with a penniless artist,

Wilhelm Hensel.'

ANNA BEER: I'm looking at a rather dreamy portrait, of Wilhelm.

Wilhelm was a struggling artist, 11 years older than Fanny.

He made his own paints from plants because he was so poor.

Not quite the husband that the Mendelssohns might have thought

for their precocious daughter.

He was packed off, in effect, to Rome for five years.

It turned out to be five years,

during which time he was not allowed to write to young Fanny.

So he wasn't allowed to write words to her

but he could send pictures, and he did.

Fanny with goodness knows what on her head,

definitely flowers.

Another cabbage or a hedge.

'Wilhelm eventually returns with a job

as Court Painter to the King, which wins over Fanny's family.

But joining the brilliant Mendelssohn circle is not easy.

BEER: The wheel is a remarkable image of the Mendelssohn family.

But where is Wilhelm?

He's clinging on to the edge of the portrait of a wheel

of the Mendelssohn family.

Fanny holding him by a string.

And in the centre is this remarkable, hunched figure

of the music-playing Felix.

The centre of everything.

And it just encapsulates how Wilhelm felt.

He's joined this remarkable family,

he's won Fanny but he's not at the centre of things.

He's clinging on for dear life.

And so, those two men, Felix and Wilhelm,

will be the compass points, as it were, of Fanny's life.

And she wants both of them.

She tells Wilhelm she wants both of them

and he has to accept that.

"You must love him unconditionally,

with no boundaries or barriers or fights between us.

Then, I'll be happy for the rest of my life."

Then, Wilhelm responds to Fanny,

"Then there's no need to parcel out your affections.

We'll both have all your love

and the three of us can never be divided."

What a situation for the poor man to be plunged into.

Here he is,

he's not just marrying Fanny, he's marrying Felix as well

and he has to love both of them.

And he has to put up with Felix having half of Fanny's love.

It's a very weird situation that they find themselves in.

He becomes this kind of cross between a rock and a cushion

on which she can depend for the rest of her life.

'So how's Fanny to express all these complicated emotions?

In the early 1800s, her options are limited.

There aren't many musical instruments she's allowed to play.

Ladies can't put anything between their legs,

so no cello or double bass.

Anything in their mouths is too suggestive,

so no flute or clarinet, or any woodwind or brass.

Basically, the only thing Fanny's allowed to do

is sit demurely at a keyboard.'

'But when Fanny's still in her teens,

the keyboard's sound is transformed

by the arrival of the first modern pianos.

Big beasts with a sturdy metal frame,

that can express every emotion.'

'And Fanny takes full advantage of it.'

LARRY TODD: When I was studying as a pianist

I always had an affinity for Felix's music

and I was just sort of drawn to it.

At that time we hardly knew anything about Fanny at all.

Just a few of her pieces were occasionally performed.

Music was absolutely her outlet, that is her private space

and that's where she can explore

and come up with these wonderful ideas.

As a composer, it's like a writer, you write every day.

It's a very lonely, solitary existence.

It's you, and in the case of music,

it's you and the piano and the music paper.

But is it going to get out there?

Is it going to have an afterlife?

She didn't expect it would.

'Larry shared his enthusiasm for Fanny with his students

and gave one of them a hint that would consume her life

for the next 12 years.'

I was in a graduate seminar at Duke where I was PhD student,

and my advisor, Larry Todd,

he'd told me before, as I was exploring Fanny Hensel,

"Oh, there's this work that we don't know a lot about.

This is lost, this Easter Sonata."

And the hint, I guess, was,

"Wouldn't it be nice if someone found it?"

So I kind of filed it away.

'Until now, Fanny's had access to the musical world,

at least indirectly, through Felix's blossoming career.

But when she's 23 and Felix is 20,

he leaves for a grand tour of Europe

which will take him onto the international stage.'

TODD: When he left in 1829 to go to England,

that was the first great separation between the siblings.

It's as if this trusted companion,

musical companion, who looked at all of her music and vice versa,

was suddenly gone.

And there's this gaping absence in her life, and...

which had to be very, very difficult for her to overcome.

'Angela went to Berlin to find out all she could about Fanny.

By now, Fanny's diaries had been made available to scholars.

And one of the first entries Angela found

was Fanny's account of Felix's departure.'

OK. This is the diary from 1829.

This was a very emotional moment for her.

FANNY MENDELSSOHN: "We got up at 04:00.

I stayed upstairs with Felix as long as I could

and helped him to dress and do some last-minute packing.

It was cold.

We watched them as they went down the street to the East.

Until we could see them no longer."

'But as soon as Felix leaves, Fanny's writing to him.

Letters so personal

that just reading them feels like eavesdropping.'

"I've been alone for two hours at the piano.

I get up, stand in front of your picture and kiss it.

And you feel so completely present

that I have to write to you just to say I'm extremely happy

but love you very much.

Very much."

It seems like Fanny is really realising now

how much she misses Felix, how much he meant to her,

how much he was in her life and how important he was to her.

It's like sending out a sonar, she wants the echo back.

She wants him to write back saying,

"Yes, yes, it's the same. I feel the same.

I will always be there for you."

She wants reassurance that getting married to somebody else

isn't going to change anything

and that somehow she will still have that incredibly deep

and vital companionship that she's always had with Felix.

'Felix doesn't write back.'

ANGELA MACE: At some point in the seminar,

Larry received a recording of a Sonate de Paques,

Easter Sonata, from a tiny little French label.

The recording that I had was a cassette.

We used cassettes in those days.

I put it in the machine and turned it on and listened to it.

("Easter Sonata")

And Larry and I looked at each other.

And my immediate instinct was...

..this has to be Fanny.

The moment I heard that music

and recognised Fanny's voice in it,

I wanted to prove that it was her music.

There was a certain freedom, a certain spontaneity of form

in this Easter Sonata that didn't sound like Felix,

a certain heightened dissonance level.

If I were to compare it to Felix's music,

I would say Fanny's plumbs the emotions

in a little more forthright manner.

And also because she was composing really for herself,

she was able to take risks, she was able to compose something

simply because she liked the sound of it.

KANNEH-MASON: So this is a section of the fourth movement

of the Easter Sonata.

And one of my favourite moments in the piece.

I love the drama of it and I've been looking at it

and just seeing how it's going.

And then I'm going to be honing in on some bits.

It's below the final tempo that it will be

and it's still a bit rough round the edges.

This movement is really...

It's a very brave composition.

It's very out there harmonically and technically.

There is so much going on, it's very dramatic.

It changes all the time.

You can see such an emotional release

in this piece and in this music.

I mean, this movement in particular is full of anger

and it's also full of excitement and agitation

and all of the kind of less socially acceptable emotions.

She has this diminished chord for ages that...

And then, instead of resolving, she ends on this chord...

So there's an F in the base

and you're not really sure where it's going harmonically.

It changes each beat.

And it almost seems at the end

like it might go to F major with the...

but then she changes it again.

And then this feels like, OK,

we're going back to the home key to A minor.

But she still doesn't,

she still ends on this new chord,

this new diminished chord.

So it's not until there that we finally land somewhere

and that was E minor.

'In October, 1829, a few months after Felix leaves,

the 23-year-old Fanny marries Wilhelm

in this church in Berlin.

But she also does something no woman has done before.

Felix is in London.

He's supposed to have sent some music for the wedding

but he has an accident

and neither he nor the music arrived.

So the night before the wedding, in the middle of the party,

Fanny sits down to compose.'

"At 08:00 the family gathered for a quiet prenuptial celebration.

Then, at around 09:00,

Hensel suggested that I write a piece

and I had the nerve to start composing

in the presence of all the guests."

"I finished at half past midnight, I don't think it's bad.

I sent it to the organist this morning

and I hope he'll agree to play it.

It's starting to get very lively around here now."

I mean, I think it's completely typical of Fanny

that she does this thing that no-one had ever done before,

which is writing her own wedding music.

Particularly not doing it the night before the wedding,

particularly not doing it in the middle of the party.

It's Fanny.

It's who she is.

I have performed this actually myself

and I also had it played at my wedding.

This is not her handwriting, by the way.

Why is it not her hand writing?

This would have been a clean copy made really quickly

so the organist could read it quickly the next day.

So at some point

between 01:00 o'clock in the morning and 12:00 o'clock...

And when she got married, yeah, someone copied it out.

He basically sight read this for her wedding.

And the cool thing about it then,

is the assembled party at her wedding

got to hear her music performed by a man

on the instrument she wasn't allowed to play.

She wasn't allowed to learn the organ.

Because? Because it was unfeminine.

Because?

Because one must spread their legs to play organ...

That's extraordinary.

..and good women keep their legs closed.

'Since then, millions of brides have walked down the aisle

to Felix's Wedding March.

The one piece of classical music everybody knows.

But Fanny celebrates her marriage in her way.'

'Fanny and Wilhelm move into the summerhouse

of her parents' home

with its vast and beautiful garden,

where she'll stay for the rest of her life.

It's a very happy marriage and soon Fanny is pregnant.

BEER: Fanny, since the age of 14 had been told

that her destiny was to be a wife and then a mother.

And she did fall pregnant.

Trouble began when Fanny, as she writes in her diary,

she had a bad night.

"On the 24th of May, I had an accident in the night,

which caused fears of an early birth

and it took all of my courage and strength to prevent it."

She knew something was seriously wrong and the decision was

complete bed rest or else she would lose the baby.

And so, that is what happened.

"In the following three weeks

my beloved Wilhelm was constantly by my side.

I'll never forget it."

BEER: She goes into labour on June 14th,

two days of labour,

and finally, a premature baby boy is born.

Remarkably and gloriously,

Sebastian, Babsen as he was called, survives.

But for me, the...

There's also a very clear psychological toll

of the confinement.

I mean, it is confinement and it's in its strictest sense.

She's confined to a space,

utterly unable to do the active things,

the creative things that make her who she is.

'Like many new mothers, Fanny is terrified

that she'll never get her old self back.

She writes to Felix hoping for reassurance

but that's not what she gets in return.'

FELIX: "If you wanted to,

you would already be composing with all your energies.

And if you don't want to, why work yourself up about it?

If I were nursing a baby, I wouldn't want to compose as well.

Seriously, the child isn't yet six months old

and you already want to think about other things?"

It's one of those things that still continues for women

that being a woman is enough.

You know, being a woman, having children,

you can be creative in the home,

that there's a lot to do and it can be enough.

But if you add to that

the kind of self-doubt that every artist has,

nobody is making you spend hours a day finishing a piece

that you don't even know where it's going to get performed.

And when the child is crying,

the house needs to be taken care of,

all daily life can take over very easily.

"The fact that one is reproached for one's miserable feminine nature

by the Lords of creation every day

and on every step of one's life,

could send a person into a rage

and rob her of her femininity.

But that, of course, would make things even worse."

Fanny didn't usually let her feelings

about her allotted feminine role in life out.

But when you have a brother and you see him being given things

that you're not being given yourself and there's no obvious reason for it

apart from the fact that he's male and you're female,

I think anybody with half a brain would be very frustrated.

But she was stuck in this terrible bind

that the only way to please her family and to be loved,

which was very important to her,

was to behave in a way that was completely alien to her nature

and moreover, to suppress her musical creativity.

And that was a bind and a struggle and a paradox

that dominated her life.

( Die Hebriden, Op. 26)

'While Fanny is in Berlin tied to domestic duties

and barely leaving the house,

Felix is travelling around Britain,

where the beauty and majesty of nature

inspire some of his most famous music.'

'Travelling is also the only way to hear music.

Fanny's cut off from that too.'

It's easy for us to forget how much was lost

by not being able to travel, by not being able to hear

Beethoven's Symphonies all over the place,

to hear the latest operas.

Fanny really was in a situation.

There are no recordings.

In order to hear music, you have to either make music yourself

or be in a room with someone who's making it.

There's no other way.

'So Fanny decides that if she can't go to where the music is,

music shall come to her.

And luckily, her gilded cage is big enough

to accommodate an impressive series of concerts.'

Fanny started these Sunday musicals in the family home.

These were elaborate affairs and Fanny really grew them.

It was really like running a festival

because she would hire the musicians,

she would programme large pieces,

she would conduct, which is really surprising,

and great musicians came to these concerts.

And most of the reports that we have from great musicians

about how impressive she was

come from the performances that they did at their home.

'Fanny's concerts, however grand, are still held in private

but Felix is out in the world, meeting the Queen of England.'

TODD: In the summer of 1842,

Felix was received at Buckingham Palace

by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.

Queen Victoria was a singer, a soprano,

and she wanted to sing one of Felix's songs.

"While they were talking, I rummaged about in the music

and soon found my first set of songs.

And which did she choose?

Italien.

Sang it quite charmingly in strict time and tune

and with very good execution."

'But the words in the song are a young girl's dream

of a place she longs to visit.'

# Fort aus der Prosa

Lasten und Muh'

Flieg ich zum Lande

Der Poesie

ALISON LANGER: This song, Italien, it's split into three verses

so she is describing her love of Italy

and her longing to go there.

She's talking about how everything is just richer.

So she says the sky is bluer, the grass is greener,

the smells are more fragrant,

oranges being really inviting to pick.

Blond du, du braun

Nickt ihr wie zierliche Grussende Fraun?

Was glanzt im Laube Funkelnd wie Gold?

It's in a waltz time,

so you can imagine if you're really excited about something,

usually you would dance around the room

and that's how I feel when I sing this song.

Warest du dies

Der unten scherzt Und murmelt so suss?

Und dies halb Wiese halb Ather zu schaun

Es war des Meeres Furchtbares Graun?

Hier will ich wohnen!

The accompaniment is really like a heartbeat

and at the end there's a really long note.

She elongates the note

because she wants to have that final outpouring of emotion.

And I think that really reads in the final part of the song.

Die Wogen

Auch dieser Brust!

'This is the favourite song

of the most powerful woman in the world

and she thinks it's by Felix.

After all, it does have his name on the front.'

TODD: So here we have two facsimiles

of the title pages of Felix's,

quote-unquote, Opus Eight and Opus Nine.

And it says 12 songs with accompaniment of the piano

set into music by in his name, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy,

is given on both pages.

There's no reference to Fanny at all.

And Italien had been published under Felix's name

in his Opus Eight and in fact it was composed by Fanny.

So Felix writes a humorous letter to Berlin,

where he says that he had to confess the mistake.

"Then, I was forced to confess that Fanny had written the song,

which I found very hard but pride must have a fall,

and to beg her to sing one of my own as well."

It doesn't look great, does it?

I mean, it doesn't make him look great.

No, it doesn't.

It makes it look as though he's practising piracy

stealing her music and so forth.

History is rarely black and white.

It's usually filled with subtle nuances

and so, it is in this case.

There is a letter where Felix asks her

basically because he's being hounded by the publisher

and he says, "If Fanny could choose some things

either mine or hers according to her discretion,"

is what he writes, "that would be a big help."

So I think Fanny's assumption was

that this was a way of getting her music out

even though her name was not attached to it.

So the irony of this trip of Felix to Buckingham Palace

and the confusion about who had composed these songs

was that, in fact,

their music could easily be mistaken for each other's.

As an example,

the Easter Sonata has a scherzo that Fanny writes

and the main theme of it something like this...

Now, this is 1828.

If we go fast forward to 1832, just a few years later,

Felix writes a piece for piano and orchestra called

the Capriccio Brillante, Opus 22,

and the second theme

of his capriccio is this...

So again, Fanny's. (PLAYING MELODY)

It's as if Fanny got to the idea first.

Felix adapted and tweaked a little bit,

turned it into a march for his Capriccio Brillante.

So in this case, the line of influence

is from Fanny to Felix, not Felix to Fanny.

There are examples both ways.

KANNEH-MASON: This is the scherzo,

which is the third movement of the Easter Sonata.

And I particularly like this movement

because I think it's also the most difficult movement.

I think here Fanny is really showing

what she can do on the piano

and she skips around the instrument a lot.

And I think to write a piece of music like this,

with so much light and shade,

shows that she was a very multi-dimensional woman

and also a fabulous pianist, obviously.

But it's very complicated music.

I think learning this music has taught me that about her.

MACE: I never expected to actually find

the Easter Sonata manuscript.

What I was going to do is, and what I did at first was,

hunt for all of the little details

that hinted at the existence of this manuscript

throughout letters and diaries of Fanny,

records from archives and those kinds of things.

To put together sort of a negative space

around this lost manuscript.

'As Angela read on,

in Fanny's diary entry about Felix's departure

she came upon four vital words.'

MACE: Yeah, this is her writing on the 13th of April.

As she's writing about 'Ostermontag', Easter Monday,

she gives so many details about that morning three days ago

when she writes it.

So that emotional impact is definitely really evident.

Right there, she says,

"Ich spielte meine Ostersonate."

"I played my Easter Sonata."

It's very matter of fact, she just drops it right in there.

Nothing else about it.

'But that's not all Angela found.'

OK. Thank you.

Here we are.

OK.

Oh, you can see something was cut out.

So this volume is quite a thick volume

and it contains pieces

that were really important to Fanny throughout her life.

Very careful with the corners.

86.

Not sure why it goes to 87, 88 and then 111.

So we are missing something right here,

which gave me the clue to start looking here.

'The volume had had a complicated history.

But luckily the archive had kept a detailed record.'

ROLAND SCHMIDT-HENSEL: The Fanny collection today is in Berlin.

It's mostly based on the collection of Hugo von Mendelssohn Bartholdy.

In this notebook,

we have a short catalogue of these 21 volumes,

and here is number six.

There's a Capriccio and there's Hero und Leander

and there is Ostersonate fur Klavier,

page 89 to 109.

And we have another note by a librarian

that this special volume was ripped from the donation.

It doesn't say why but it didn't arrive here.

Then, in 1973,

the volume appeared at an auction house here in Germany

but without these pages, without the Easter Sonata,

because this was removed.

I knew that pages 89 through 110 were missing

and that any manuscript I'd be looking for in the future

would hopefully have 89 through 110 on it

to prove that it was the work missing from this volume.

'The one thing nobody knew

was why the Easter Sonata manuscript had been removed from the volume.

But Angela realised

that the manuscript must have been in Paris

when the recording was made.'

MACE: As part of my research I found out,

the pianist who had recorded this Easter Sonata,

this Sonate de Paques for the French label,

was a man named Eric Heidsieck

and I looked him up.

I found out he still lives in Paris.

And was able to get his contact information

and one of the questions I had for him was

if he'd ever seen the manuscript and he said,

"Absolutely, I did once back in the early 70s."

But he hadn't seen it since then.

So a week or two before I actually got on the plane

and flew to Paris,

I, as a last ditch effort, gave him a call

and asked him if he had any idea

if the manuscript owner would let us see it.

A short time later he called me back and said,

"Yes, we have an appointment on Sunday

to go see the manuscript."

Le-le, la-di-da

La-la-la-la, la-la-la-la

Dee-ahh, pa-pa-pa, pim

I'd never been to Paris before.

I don't speak French very well, really, at all.

So I was just following him as best I could.

MACE: When we arrive at the building,

we walk into Coudert's office

and it's just masses of papers and records.

I'm thinking, "Where is the manuscript in all of this?"

It's completely chaotic and he hands me this folder

and I don't know where to put it down.

Very surreal experience holding this manuscript in my hands

that A, I never expected to find

and B, no-one had seen at least a good 40 years.

It was a heart-stopping moment

because I recognised it as her handwriting.

That would establish that this really was the Easter Sonata.

MACE: I wasn't there to get his opinion

'cause he clearly thought it was Felix.

Time stretched in weird ways in that moment.

But I did get a chance to turn every page over

and there were numbers

on the lower right-hand corner of the pages.

And the numbers on the lower right-hand corner

of the manuscript, 89 through 110,

matched the missing pages

in the volume that is now in the Staatsbibliothek.

'Angela had now seen

both Fanny's handwriting on the manuscript

and the page numbers matching the gap in the Berlin volume,

but she had no photos to prove Fanny's authorship.

And then, it vanished again.'

'Still barely 30, Fanny is busy with her concerts,

but she also adores her son Sebastian

and wants another child.'

BEER: Fanny fell pregnant again,

and again was confined to bed

for reasons that we're not entirely sure of

but clearly the situation was precarious.

It was September.

She stayed in bed week after week after week.

And then, in November,

there's this stark, painful to read entry in her diary

where she writes, "I was delivered of a dead baby girl."

And that for me is Fanny Hensel's life.

She's expected, she expects herself

to soak up these experiences, these traumas, these losses

and keep the brave face going, stay strong and she did it.

She did that again and again.

We're now moving to a song

from slightly later in her career as a composer.

And this is called Abschied, which is Farewell.

Not only has this never been published

and, as far as I know or anyone knows,

maybe never sung, maybe never heard.

It shows what I think is really special

about Fanny's voice as a composer,

which is this extremely emotional quality to it.

Emotional in the sense that, as a singer,

and an opera singer especially,

the length of the phrases, the breadth of the phrases,

actually allows for a sort of outpouring of a very raw

and very earnest emotion.

Something that actually really physically comes from within.

("Abschied")

Was ist das Leben?

Kommen nur und Schwinden

Ein Wechsel...

The theme, the text of this poem,

"Was ist das Leben?"

"What is life?"

Big philosophical questions.

"Von Nacht und Tagesheller, Verlust und Schmerz."

"From night and day's brilliance,

pain, sorrow, loss."

She's expressing things

that not only could a woman not express in public society

but actually no-one in this era of a conservative Germany

could express this sort of feeling outside of poetry.

Durch Traum

und Wachen hin die Welle

Probably as far as she knew, she was the only person,

only woman that was sitting down and being a composer.

That act of writing down,

fulfilling this restricted role

that was laid out by her society that she could not be.

And yet, she sat down,

she defied, she was brave, she chose.

Not only did she do it, but she excelled.

And it makes me think of her as this really political figure.

Every time she sits down to write

being an act of defiance or an act of desire.

'Two centuries on, still only 5% of the music

in the world's concert halls is by women,

and the barriers Fanny faced have been compounded by others.

We all have this sort of dance around the whole idea of equality

but things aren't equal.

I'm always trying to undo the injustices.

And so we always have female composers, Black composers,

people who've been overlooked and neglected

for no good reason.

And when you come to London,

it's arguably the most diverse city in the world.

So everywhere you go it's multinational.

And then the minute I stepped into my place of work,

everything changed.

I would always be the odd one out.

When I was beginning to create the Chineke! orchestra,

the more I spoke to people, I heard people saying,

"But you'll never be able to do it, Chi-chi,

because it's not really your sort of music, is it?

It's not really Black people's music

and the Black people who do play classical instruments,

they're not very good at it."

I just heard this from a few people and I just thought,

"You know what? I'm going to look anyway."

What was really clear and extraordinary,

which I will never forget,

is the first moment of coming into a rehearsal room

with all these people of different nationalities and colours

just carrying a flute or a violin or a bassoon

as though it's the most normal thing.

I think it's probably the first time in all of our lives

that the only thing we had to think about was the music,

nothing else.

Everyone belongs, which is a basic human need.

'Realising that Fanny's childbearing days are probably over,

her mother Lea, herself a gifted musician,

understands her daughter needs something else to live for.

And it finally changes her mind about Fanny's longing

to be a published musician.

Lea writes to Felix,

but she can't share her reasons with a man,

even her own son.

"Now, permit me to pose a question and a request.

Shouldn't Fanny publish a selection of her songs

and piano pieces?

The only thing holding her back

is that you haven't suggested it or encouraged her to do so.

Wouldn't it be reasonable for you to cheer her on

and help her find a publisher?"

BEER: She handles him very, very carefully with kid gloves.

She flatters him. She massages his ego.

But she's sending a very important message,

"Your sister is in trouble. Your sister is struggling.

Please, could you support her now?"

'Felix replies to Lea

but specifies she's not to show the letter to Fanny.'

"I can't encourage her to publish

since it's against my principles but also my views.

People should only publish if they commit to it for life.

That means a stream of works one after the other.

To send out just one or two is, in effect,

a vanity project for friends.

A horrible idea.

Fanny has neither the drive nor the vocation

for professional authorship,

because she's too much a proper wife as she should be."

I mean, this is just completely mad and completely unfathomable

and probably the single greatest mystery

in their entire relationship.

This is the man who spent the first 20 years of his life

side by side with her.

This is the man who knows

that she has been writing up until this point,

probably 300 pieces of music.

He says he doesn't think she's serious.

A completely beggars' belief.

I have no idea what was going through his mind

and I don't think I ever will.

'Fortunately, the other man in her life

understands Fanny better.'

Wilhelm is an unsung hero of the 19th century

because he was that rare beast.

A husband, an artist in his own right,

who supported 100% his artist wife, Fanny Hensel.

What he gave Fanny Hensel

is permission to continue composing.

And then, year after year, the encouragement to take her music

out into the wider world against every single wish of her family.

Wilhelm had enough confidence in his wife.

Her music was good enough and she was strong enough.

("Italien")

Schoner und schoner Schmuckt sich der Plan

'All her life, Fanny has longed to go to Italy,

dreamed and written songs about it

but she's never managed to get there.'

Flieg ich zum Lande Der Poesie

'Finally, in 1839, Wilhelm takes her there

and it blows her mind.'

Dort an dem Maishalm Schwellend von Saft

Straubt sich der Aloe

Storrische Kraft

ROTHENBERG: Her happiest time was perhaps the year

that she spent in Italy

and I think we all still feel like that.

Everyone wants to go to Italy

and it's a place where just the joy in life is so important.

And I think it's tremendously liberating for Fanny, this trip.

"The stars above and the lights of the city below,

the glow worms and a long trailing meteor

which shot across the sky,

all combined to stir the deepest emotion in us.

All these experiences have made me younger, not older.

Even as a child I was never praised as I have been here

and that it's pretty enjoyable, nobody can deny."

She brings with her not just her tremendous pianistic abilities,

but her knowledge of German music, of Bach, of Beethoven.

She performs five, six enormous Beethoven sonatas

in one afternoon for the group of musicians there.

She's also being appreciated

as a remarkable musician in her own right.

And she returns to Germany

knowing much more who she is as a musician.

'Back home in chilly grey Berlin,

Fanny cheers herself up by composing a song cycle

she calls Das Jahr, The Year.

Over an hour of music, which Wilhelm illustrates

with beautiful vignettes of their trip.'

This is extraordinary with these images.

Yes.

I love this opening, like a dream.

You can see the references to Italy that go throughout it.

So even though it is composed a year after Italy,

the experience of Italy certainly stays.

So it seems like this meant a lot to both of them.

It's a big piano cycle in 12 movements,

there's one for each month of the year.

The first movement, January,

also has the subtitle The Dream

and it really works as a kind of overture.

And what I think is so remarkable is from the start,

you can tell that this is the beginning of a big story.

("Das Jahr")

ROTHENBERG: There's something so incredibly romantic

and daring about Das Jahr.

She doesn't perform Das Jahr for anyone

and I don't know whether she thought it was too out there,

too wild.

It's hard to say.

She ends the first movement on a big heroic note

and gives you a sense of the kind of virtuosity

that's going to come afterwards.

"Now I'm engaged in another small work

that's giving me much fun. Namely a series of 12 piano pieces

meant to depict the months of the year.

I'll make clean copies

and they'll be ornamented with vignettes

for the pleasure of others."

This is the only time she mentions Das Jahr,

which is an unarguable masterpiece.

And she just basically throws out this little remark about,

"I'm doing this little thing and it's going to be a lot of fun."

And I think it's something about Fanny

that I think is incredibly important,

incredibly familiar and completely infuriating,

which is that she cannot take herself seriously,

at least in public, as a creative artist.

In private, when she's working,

obviously she puts everything into it.

But as soon as she's with other people,

she wants to defang her formidableness.

She wants to defang and minimise the power and the force

of her creativity and her energy and her brilliance,

because somehow that might be threatening to people

or it might be alarming

or it might be, God forbid, unfeminine.

And yet, at some level, just like Fanny,

I think any woman who is seriously aspiring

to be a creative artist

takes it very, very seriously when they're at work.

'Not long after Fanny returns from Italy,

her mother Lea dies.

Her father had died seven years earlier.

Fanny, not yet 40, wonders if she'll be next.'

BEER: In one of the letters from this time,

she's sorting through her mother's papers

and a mother who had come around to support her desire

to publish her work, her music.

And she says, "Who will remember me when I am forgotten?"

I think that's one of the things that pushed her

into getting this public identity,

to getting her music out there. "Who will remember me?

Not just remember me as a wife and a mother but as a composer?"

But in that same letter she writes,

"I hope I have a bit more time."

("Notturno in G minor")

TODD: I have here a facsimile of Fanny's autograph of the Notturno.

And what's remarkable about this

is that she actually notated a specific instruction

telling the pianist how to use the pedal in the Notturno.

One wonders, "Why did she write it down?

Who was going to be playing this music

if it weren't herself?"

So that to me tells me that she was a composer

who wanted her music to be heard and understood.

So it's like an instruction to a pianist

who someday would play this piece.

'By now,

Fanny doesn't have to go looking for a publisher.

After the success of her concerts,

publishers are coming to her begging for her works.

Finally, she makes up her mind to defy Felix and accept.

SCHMIDT-HENSEL: This is the diary from 1840 onwards

which she wrote.

I would try to find the page from 1846.

It should be there.

MACE: I'm also looking at the way she wrote it.

The importance of these words jumps off the page.

So what's she saying here?

She's saying that she has decided to accept the offers

of some Berlin publishers

who have been approaching her for a while

asking her to publish.

So a huge moment. Huge moment.

CITRON: "I wouldn't expect you to read this rubbish now,

busy as you are,

if I didn't have to tell you something.

But since I know from the start that you won't like it,

it's a bit awkward to get underway.

So, laugh at me or not as you wish,

I'm afraid of my brother at age 40

as I was of Father at age 14.

I thus feel rather..."

there she wrote that in English, "uncomfortable."

"In a word, I'm beginning to publish."

And then she goes on to say, and this is really interesting,

that if things go well with the publishing

that everyone in the family should know

that she was not looking for professional fame.

It's amazing, really.

It's an apology to say,

"Don't worry, I didn't cause this. I just want you to know that."

So it says a lot about the role of a woman,

an educated, talented woman, that this seemed improper.

BEER: She's 40 and she acknowledges

she's as nervous standing up to Felix

as she was when she was 14

and she didn't stand up to her father, Abraham.

And that tension between the girl of 14

and the woman of 40, the journey she's been on there,

and finally, she's ready to step up and say,

"This is important to me. I'm standing up to you."

She's on her way Felix or no Felix.

("Das Jahr, August")

'Having made up her mind to publish, the floodgates open for Fanny.

She writes 51 works in a year.

She begins by publishing songs, as this is where the market is.

She writes in her diary, "I feel newly-born."'

And here we have a facsimile of the title page

of the first edition of her Opus One,

which are six songs for a voice with the accompaniment of the piano.

Her name, Fanny Hensel,

but then there is this 'geboren' of Mendelssohn Bartholdy.

But at least there is her name

and it is in bigger print than Mendelssohn Bartholdy.

She is emerging as a published composer.

This must have been extraordinary for her to see this.

'The Easter Sonata manuscript had been auctioned,

but nobody knew where it was.

Angela had almost lost hope of ever proving Fanny's authorship.

Then, years later, in 2021,

she got a call from Rochester, New York.'

LEHMAN: Well, I used to do a lot of painting.

So I'm painting away to Percy Faith and his orchestra.

(Serenade For Strings in C Major, Op. 48)

Wow.

What is THAT?

Holy crap!

I've never heard anything like it.

On came a piece of classical music.

I was about 15, I guess.

I'd lived that long

without ever hearing a note of classical music.

It turned out to be Tchaikovsky.

I can't remember what piece.

So I started to listen to classical music

and I discovered that composers put a great deal more on paper

than notes.

And so, for over 50 years now,

I've collected music manuscripts.

I would peruse the sales rooms

three or four times a year,

so I looked at the Drouot auction site

and here was this Mendelssohn thing.

What the heck is that?

So to make a long story short, I bought the manuscript.

And the rest of the story is,

my dear wife, Marie, went to work.

'Robin's wife Marie is a musicologist.

And she'd spent eight years

working on the manuscript in their home.

Comparing every detail to Fanny's other works,

to prepare a definitive edition, for publication in Fanny's name.

Finally, Angela has a chance to see the manuscript properly

and prove to the world that it's Fanny's work.'

MARIE ROLF: Here she is. It's a special day for Fanny Hensel.

Yes it is.

May I have a look? Yeah.

On the other side you may see a package

from the people who... The auction house.

Yeah, who sold it.

And then,

we have the mylar cover

and a bunch of acid free paper to protect it and there she is.

(INHALES SHARPLY) Wow.

When I saw this for the first time in 2010,

I had just 45 minutes to look at it,

so a very short amount of time.

I knew I had to go in with four really specific questions

to prove what I believed was true.

And the first one was, does it have a title?

And yes, it does, "Ostersonate" right there.

Another thing I was looking at

was where she writes in the top corner

the dates of when she started and finished movements.

That was an absolute joy to find

because I didn't know I was going to find that.

I love that she gave us those clues.

Felix didn't do that kind of thing.

At the very end she writes...

I don't wanna... I'll be very careful with it.

The 10th of May, 1828, 'abends', evening, half to ten.

So she is at home,

she tended to write and play in the company of other people,

just like we saw in that diary entry from 1829.

She gives this huge list of what they did,

who they saw, the baptism they went to,

who came over for lunch, who came over for dinner,

who stayed for a while.

And then she writes at the very end,

"I played my Easter Sonata."

"I played MY Easter Sonata." Yes.

And then,

I wanted to look at the bottom right-hand corner of the pages

because that was one of the biggest clues in the records.

And there's my number, 89.

ROLF: Yes, until 110.

That's right, oh, my goodness.

So when I saw that, I really knew. It just hit me like a ton of bricks.

This is the missing manuscript.

This is the Easter Sonata that we're looking for.

'In October, 2022,

Isata was preparing to perform Marie's brand-new edition

of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel's Easter Sonata.'

Here we are. KANNEH-MASON: Yes.

194 years after Fanny wrote this.

Yes, we are.

And 14 years since Angela started looking for it.

Yes.

And eight years since Marie started working on it.

And how many months have you been working on it?

Yes. And here we are.

Yes, yeah.

It's been such a journey in so many ways.

I feel very excited, a bit nervous,

but those two things go hand in hand.

And I can feel the weight of all that's gone into this piece

in terms of composing it

and then rediscovering it and working on it.

I'm just so excited to finally be performing it

in front of a live audience as well.

I just wonder whether you ever think about what you want to do

or be in your life in the longer term,

or are you just young enough

that you are just focused on what is happening now?

I think I feel a sense of panic a lot of the time

because I know very much what I enjoy.

I know I enjoy performing, I know I enjoy composing.

I know that I care a lot about the people in my life.

And, strangely, I tend to worry about death quite a lot

maybe since I was about 20,

I've often felt that life was really short

and that anyone could die at any point.

'Cause often I feel very stressed

that there's so many things I want to do in my life

and there's not really enough time.

'In May, 1847,

Fanny is rehearsing her choir for a performance,

when her arms go numb.

This has happened to her before, so she's not too worried.

But this time, it doesn't go away.'

TODD: She suddenly felt faint

and she had to leave the rehearsal

and she told them to continue rehearsing, which they did.

She listened to it from an adjacent room

and felt progressively more and more ill and died that night.

She has a stroke, like her mother did just a few years earlier,

and she's 41.

And Wilhelm is devastated,

I mean, broken, broken by this.

He does what he does at these moments,

he can't speak but he can pick up his pen and he can draw.

And he sketches his beloved wife in peace, in death.

It is such a beautiful portrait.

But there's such love in that and such grief.

Finsternisse...

'In this final portrait,

Wilhelm gives Fanny a laurel wreath,

symbol of the artist triumphant.'

Herz hinein

Felix at the time was in Frankfurt

and he received the news a few days later.

And when he received the news

he shrieked and collapsed to the floor.

For a while he couldn't compose a note.

He writes to Wilhelm to say,

"If my writing causes you to shed tears,

put away the writing, we have nothing to do but shed tears."

(String Quartet No. 6, In F Minor, Op. 80)

"We have nothing left now but to weep.

We've been so happy together

but a sadder life is beginning now.

You made her happy always.

I thank you for it.

But with bitter pangs of regret

that I did not do more myself for her happiness,

did not see her oftener.

This is a changed world for us all now

but we must try to get used to the change.

Though by the time we've got used to it,

our lives may be over, too."

'Less than six months later, Felix too is dead.

When he missed Fanny's last birthday,

he promised, "Next year we'll be together."

He keeps his word.'

LEHMAN: People, when they own manuscripts, they think,

"Well, if somebody lays eyes on it now, it's less valuable."

And I've always found that quite odd.

I think it's the opposite.

The manuscripts are too important

for me to keep in a drawer.

And 50 years ago I went to the Morgan Library

and put all these things on deposit

and they've been there ever since.

'The critical edition of the Easter Sonata

has finally restored Fanny to her rightful place

among the musical greats.

Meanwhile, the manuscript joined Bach, Beethoven,

and her brother

in the world's biggest private manuscript collection,

in the Morgan Library in New York.'

ROBINSON McCLELLAN: Very excited to have

this Fanny Mendelssohn manuscript

revealing for the first time here at the Morgan Library.

And it's always fun unpacking these new arrivals.

Let's see here.

It's so beautiful. 1828.

I love seeing these manuscripts.

The careful pen strokes and of course corrections,

when you see the wonderful paste overs

where they made a mistake and corrected it.

It's wonderful to have this manuscript here.

We're going to be sharing it with everyone that we can.

We're very proud that Fanny's manuscript joins

an august and full collection

and really takes its place among all these treasures.

We are very happy.

PARKER-LANGSTON: There's a beautiful term in landscape gardening,

'desire line', which is when people deviate from...

the prescribed path

and their footsteps start to forge a new path

that other people can follow that begins really faintly.

But then, as people walk it time and time again,

it becomes more and more well-established

and then people have a choice.

And she's one of the first footsteps on this path

for a woman in music to be a composer,

or a serious composer,

that she not only broke that ground during her life

but has continued to inspire people to do ever since.

TODD: Just that she could produce nearly 500 compositions

in just a few short decades against the various odds

that she had to contend with.

And, when you play it and listen to it and come to know it,

you know that it is authentic genuine music,

and that's the best that music can be.

'My great-great-great grandmother

would probably be amazed and delighted

that the labour of so many people has brought her music back to life.

And she's just one of countless women

whose stories and creative works have been overlooked

in the established histories.

I still can't quite believe

that she managed to write so much astonishing music

in so few years and against such odds.

But now that Fanny's back in the world,

her example is there to inspire and encourage others.'

("Easter Sonata")

(String Quartet In E Flat Major, H-U 277: IV. Allegro Molto Vivace)

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