Fanny Mendelssohn

Fanny Mendelssohn was born in Berlin on 14 November 1805 and trained alongside her younger brother Felix under the same teachers, including Ludwig Berger and Carl Friedrich Zelter. The two became close, but social conventions and family reservations kept her from the public career her talent warranted; she rarely performed outside her family circle, and six of her songs appeared in Felix's Opus 8 and 9 collections under his name. She married artist Wilhelm Hensel in 1829 and had one child, Sebastian, in 1830. In 1846, with her husband's support but lingering family ambivalence, she published a collection of songs as her Opus 1. She died of a stroke on 14 May 1847, aged 41, leaving a catalogue of over 450 compositions that scholarship has only begun to reclaim in earnest since the 1990s.