249 of altogether 466 works listed in her works’ catalogue leave no doubt: the lied was central to Fanny Hensel’s compositional output! From the first extant composition by the 14-year-old – a lied written in 1819 for her father’s birthday – to the last, inscribed in 1847, the lied runs like a red thread through her entire oeuvre. It’s therefore high time that a volume of songs (HN 1610) was finally added to the anthology of piano works (HN 392) published by Henle publishing house decades ago!
Especially since the current state of research on Fanny Hensel, née Mendelssohn Bartholdy, is practically ideal for an Urtext publishing house. The oeuvre of this composer – who, until the 1980s, was perceived merely as “the sister of” and thus vastly underestimated – has since been documented in a scholarly works’ catalogue; a large portion of the surviving sources in the Mendelssohn Archive at the Berlin State Library are accessible online; letters and diaries have been scholarly edited; and numerous studies on her life and work have been published. Last but not least, the online platform Hensel Songs Online, where tenor Timothy Parker-Langston presents transcriptions of all Fanny Hensel’s lieder, provides a comprehensive overview of the lieder. What more can be desired?! Continue reading
