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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2011
In my experience, everyone among my acquaintances, friends, family members, students and colleagues who has encountered Fanny Hensel's ‘Song without Words’ [Song for Piano] op. 8, no. 1 in B minor, has recognized its special character – perhaps responding above all to its sense of ‘multum in parvo’, or ‘much in a small space’. This article offers some reflections on what it is that makes this piece so special and gives it this particular effect. As well as paying attention to the patterns, relationships and textures created by the notes, it seeks to suggest that one way of ‘reading’ the music may lie in its author's personality and circumstances.
* This paper is dedicated to my daughter Anne, who has shared my love of Fanny Hensel's op. 8, no. 1. In focusing on this piece, I have found myself – originally unwittingly – responding to R. Larry Todd's open invitation as expressed in his ‘Stylistic Affinities in the Works of Fanny Hensel and Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’, in The Mendelssohns: Their Music in History, ed. John Michael Cooper and Julie D. Prandi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002): 245–61, here at 255 (‘A detailed analysis of this poignantly beautiful piece must await another occasion’). I am grateful to Larry Todd, and also to Matthew Head, for advice.
1 Sirota, V. Ressmeyer, ‘The Life and Works of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel’, DMA diss. (Boston, 1981).Google Scholar
2 Ibid.: 169.
3 Mostly where Sirota's and my accounts of the piece diverge it is in ambiguous areas of the form (where the ambiguity is inherent in Hensel's formal treatment).
4 Françoise Tillard concurs with this view: in her programme notes on op. 8, no. 1 for the concert in which she performed the piece at the Holywell Music Room, Oxford, on 22 July 2005 as part of the bicentenary conference, she suggested that ‘it could be a prelude influenced by Bach, with the addition of an expressive singing line’.
5 Features marking the prelude include the strong urge to proceed in moto perpetuo, the unified patterning, and the opening tonic pedal point supporting the characteristic arching harmonic progression.
6 See for instance Rosen on ‘Fragments’: Rosen, Charles, The Romantic Generation (London: HarperCollins, 1995): ch. 2, esp. 82–7 on Chopin's PreludesGoogle Scholar.
7 Camilla Cai has observed pertinently how ‘the image of a thread already in the process of being spun out describes well Hensel's restless openings to many of her pieces, for example, 6/1 and 5/5’: Cai, C., ‘Texture and Gender: New Prisms for Understanding Hensel's and Mendelssohn's Piano Pieces’, in Cooper, and Prandi, , eds, The Mendelssohns: Their Music in History: 53–84Google Scholar , here at 84.
8 Such intensity can be regarded as characteristic of Hensel. Larry Todd (‘Fanny Hensel's Op. 6, No. 1 and the Art of Musical Reminiscence’: see this issue, p. 97) notes of that piece, too, ‘an intensity of effect that sets it apart from many of her brother's Lieder ohne Worte’.
9 Rummenhöller, P., ‘Lied ohne Worte, Op. 8, 2’, in Fanny Hensel geb. Mendelssohn Bartholdy: Komponieren zwischen Geselligkeitsideal und romantischer Musikästhetik, ed. Borchard, Beatrix and Schwarz-Danuser, Monika, 2nd edn (Kassel: Furore, 2002): 47–54, here at 48.Google Scholar
10 This ‘often-quoted reflection’ (see Larsen, Jens Peter with Feder, Georg, The New Grove Haydn (London: Macmillan, 1982): 28Google Scholar ) was first reported by Haydn's biographer Griesinger, G.A. in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (1809, published separately 1810)Google Scholar.
11 For a presentation of some general features, see Tischler, Hans and Tischler, Louise H., ‘Mendelssohn's “Songs without Words”’, Musical Quarterly 33 (1947): 1–16Google Scholar ; and (for a more extensive survey) Jost, Christa, Mendelssohn's Lieder ohne Worte (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1988)Google Scholar ; also, for commentary on selected pieces, Todd, R. Larry, Mendelssohn: A Life in Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003): passimGoogle Scholar.
12 It is possible to identify subspecies within the genre; and to acknowledge that Mendelssohn did establish stereotypes, rather in the way that Corelli's works, operating in well-defined styles, set the standard procedure for his followers and imitators so that his own production seems in retrospect stereotyped (see Talbot, Michael, ‘Corelli’, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Sadie, Stanley and Tyrrell, John, 2nd rev. edn, 29 vols (London: Macmillan, 2001): vol. 6, 457–63)Google Scholar.
13 Cf. op. 19, no. 6, and op. 30, no. 3. Cai, ‘Texture and Gender’: 84, refers to the ‘formal, stand-alone introductions’ that are ‘quite common among Mendelssohn's Songs without Words’ (noting Hensel's general ‘avoidance’ of this device). In Hensel's op. 8, no. 1 the elision of sections (as at bar 46) increases the momentum.
14 See op. 30, no. 4, opening and coda sections.
15 Occasionally these are replaced by written-out repeats incorporating minor variants.
16 There are further aspects of their differences to be discussed below, including their key-schemes.
17 Where the middle line taking the triplets has rests, another part typically fills in the gap (as at bars 13 ff.). However, the combination of notated duplet and triplet values (bars 17 ff., Ex. 3, and comparable passages) does not seem intended to add an extra element of disturbance to the rhythmic surface. The performance on CD by Keith Weber (fortepiano): ‘Fanny Mendelssohn Lieder’, Newport Classic NPD 85652 (1999) seems to me to demonstrate the inappropriateness in this case of ignoring the original layout, which aligns the demisemiquavers of the dotted-rhythm figures in the top voice with the last note of the groups of semiquaver triplets in the middle part. The coda, which is full of these rhythmic figures in combination, appears particularly ‘mannered’ in this performance.
18 Cf. his Intermezzo in B♭ minor op. 117, no. 2, for an example of this.
19 The delayed move to D major is in fact eventually effected by non-classical means (bars 29–30) with a Schubertian quality of swiftness.
20 And, as it happens, this is paralleled in Brahms's op. 117, no. 2, in his treatment of B♭ minor and D♭ major. For a discussion of this and other strategies in Brahms's piece, see Elmar Budde, ‘Johannes Brahms’ Intermezzo op. 117, Nr. 2’, in Analysen: Festschrift für Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Werner Breig et al., zum, BeihefteArchiv für Musikwissenschaft, 13 (1984): 324–37Google Scholar . Budde also uses the phrase ‘multum in parvo’ for this piece's sense of creating much in a small space.
21 See Todd, Mendelssohn: A Life in Music; in contrast Todd refers there (114) to an unpublished Fantasia for piano of 1823 as showing ‘tonal latitude unusual for Felix’. See also Todd's ‘Fanny Hensel's Op. 6, No. 1 and the Art of Musical Reminiscence’, pp. 89–100 of this issue.
22 Reference to motifs as ‘x’ and ‘y’ in my examples does not connote the same elements in the composition as Sirota's use of these labels (see Table 1).
23 Brahms also, as seen in his op. 117, no. 2, combines such deeply woven connections with surface melodic unity.
24 Cornelia Bartsch, ‘Das Lied ohne Worte op. 6,1 als offener Brief’, in Borchard and Schwarz-Danuser, eds, Fanny Hensel geb. Mendelssohn Bartholdy: 55–72; and see also her contribution to these proceedings, below. For a different angle on this piece see R. Larry Todd's article in this issue.
25 Jost, Christa, Mendelssohns Lieder ohne Worte: 133.Google Scholar
26 Cornelia Bartsch's research has been particularly prominent in this area: see Bartsch, ‘Das Lied ohne Worte op. 6,1 als offener Brief’, as well as her contribution to these proceedings, pp.125–38 of this issue.
27 See Todd, ‘On Stylistic Affinities in the Works of Fanny Hensel and Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’: 255–7, with illuminating commentary on its effect. Felix's Die Erste Walpurgisnacht was one of her favourite pieces.
28 Sirota, , ‘The Life and Works of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel’: 170.Google Scholar
29 Daverio, John, Crossing Paths: Schubert, Schumann and Brahms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Daverio refers (p. 4) to ‘a trio of paths that converged’ in the case of Schubert, Schumann and Brahms, as a preamble to his study of their musical interconnectedness.
30 R. Larry Todd, keynote address, ‘On Mendelssohn and Constructions of Britishness’, Fifth Biennial International Conference on Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain, University of Nottingham, 8 July 2005.
31 Rieger, Eva, Foreword to her edition of Fanny Hensel: Vier Lieder ohne Worte (Kassel: Furore, 1989)Google Scholar . For some listeners this might appear a ‘too-bright’ B major. It should be noted that the large-scale, elaborated ‘Tierce de Picardie’ effect created by this coda would fit in with the reference to Felix's song ‘Suleika’, which, as Sirota points out, also moves from tonic minor to tonic major.
32 In Brahms's op. 117, no. 2 ( a piece which, as noted earlier, is in some respects very comparable with Fanny Hensel's op. 8, no. 1) a very different ending is produced, playing out finally the tensions that have been running through the piece and finishing resolutely in the minor.
33 The quotation comes from the much-discussed letter of Abraham Mendelssohn to his 14-year-old daughter Fanny, 16 Jul. 1820 ; Hensel, Sebastian, The Mendelssohn Family (1729-1847) from Letters and Journals, trans. Klingemann, Carl Jr [] (London: Sampson Low, Marston Searle & Rivington, 1881): I, 80Google Scholar.
34 On these matters see especially Marcia Citron's Introduction in The Letters of Fanny Hensel to Felix Mendelssohn, Collected, Edited and Translated with Introductory Essays and Notes (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon, 1987)Google Scholar . For a discussion of the ‘salon’ vis-à-vis Fanny Hensel's music-making, see Beatrix Borchard in ‘Leipziger Straβe Drei: Sites for Music’, on pp. 119–25 of this issue.
35 The symphonic analogy explored here was suggested by Matthew Head in discussion following the delivery of the present paper in its original form.
36 I am grateful to Françoise Tillard and Larry Todd for their helpful insights into this aspect of performing the piece.
37 Cai can find only a single trace, ‘one hint of sonata rhetoric’, in Hensel's op. 8, no. 1, claiming that ‘other sonata elements are absent’ (Cai, ‘Texture and Gender’: 81).
38 On the whole, acknowledging ‘beauty’ in music has tended not to feature in analytical literature of recent decades. But there have been signs of a renewed willingness to discuss it: see, for example, Todd on op. 8, no. 1 (quoted in the asterisked note at the beginning of the present paper).
39 Among the piece's most striking moments, the inverse Tierce de Picardie at bar 50 has a particularly powerful effect on the music's trajectory, setting off the exploratory series of keys outlined in Example 5. It is a sign of maturity of conception when particular ‘moments’ relate to other ‘moments’ in a piece; thus the augmented sixth/diminished seventh over a dominant pedal point at bars 7–8 connects with the retransitional passage from bars 70 to 75 leading up to the arrival of the tonic on its return at bar 76 (see Ex. 7), which represents a reworking of one moment into another. The original event ‘predicts’ the later one (here the retransition and return), while the later appearance realizes possibilities latent in the original ‘moment’.
40 See Frisch, Walter, Brahms and the Principle of Developing Variation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).Google Scholar
41 ‘Overblown’ is not intended here as derogatory, merely descriptive of the kind of ‘grand’ gestures that her piece displays throughout.
42 On Hensel's compositional process see Camilla Cai, preface to her edition of Fanny Hensel (née Mendelssohn): Songs for Pianoforte, 1836–1837, Recent Researches in the Music of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, vol. 22 (Madison: A-R Editions, 1994)Google Scholar . Rudolf Elvers in his foreword to Fanny Hensel: Ausgewählte Klavierwerke, ed. KistnerHensel, Fanny (Munich: Henle, 1986): viiGoogle Scholar , notes that ‘a comparison of the existing autographs with those piano pieces and lieder which the composer herself saw into print, reveals that, like her brother Felix, Fanny understood her “editorial capacities” to include making changes and improvements for the printed edition’.
