Fanny Hensel’s Sechs Lieder, Op. 9

Abstract

In October 1847, five months after Fanny Hensel died, her brother Felix Mendelssohn brought several of her manuscripts to his publisher. Three years later, these works appeared in print as Fanny’s Opp. 8, 9, 10, and 11, though who selected these pieces for publication remains unclear. The siblings’ music, however, provides another form of evidence that can shed light on Felix’s role in the dissemination of his sister’s music. This chapter examines Fanny’s Sechs Lieder, Op. 9, a collection that is intimately connected to one of Felix’s own song collections, Zwölf Lieder, Op. 9 (1830). Considering these intertextual resonances, it is difficult not to see Fanny’s Op. 9 as a sibling collaboration in its own right, a brother’s musical elegy to his departed sister.