Fanny Hensel (Mendelssohn) | Chicago Symphony Orchestra

For most of the 20th century, Fanny Hensel, née Mendelssohn, was often regarded as a musical dilettante — an intriguing footnote to the biography of her much more famous composer-brother, Felix.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, when archives in the former East Germany became available to researchers, the full scope of her accomplishments has emerged. At last, Hensel is being seen in an entirely new light.

That reconsideration has accelerated in recent years with heightened attention on gender disparities in the classical-music world.   

“She is now recognized as a really important composer of the 19th century, which is as it should be,” said R. Larry Todd, author of Fanny Hensel: The Other Mendelssohn, which was published by Oxford University Press in 2010. The book emerged out of research that he began in writing his earlier biography of her brother. “It was a pretty easy step to decide that we needed a new book about her,” Todd said.

Hensel’s String Quartet in E-flat Major will be the culminating work on a virtual concert that debuts April 15 on the CSOtv video portal. Four members of the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s pre-professional training orchestra, will perform the work, along with selections by Joseph Boulogne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, and Rebecca Clarke.

One of four children, Fanny Mendelssohn (1805-1847) was born in Hamburg nearly four years before Felix, and the two received similar musical training, including lessons with Johann Nepomuk Hummel, a student of Mozart, and Ignaz Moscheles. Like her brother, she was something of a prodigy, playing all 24 preludes from J.S. Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier by memory by the time she was 14. The two had a close relationship, with the siblings influencing each other’s compositions and her works sometimes played alongside her brother’s during concerts organized by the Mendelsssohns.

A quick note on the composer’s name: She was born Fanny Mendelssohn, but in 1816, she was baptized in the Lutheran faith and gained the added surname of Bartholdy in her family’s attempt to downplay their Jewish origins. She became Fanny Hensel in 1829, after she married artist Wilhelm Hensel, but when a little of her music was released at the end of her life, the publishers made sure to put “born Mendelssohn” after her married name to build on her brother’s fame.

There are 467 extant works by Hensel, considerably more than anyone for many decades realized she had produced, but Todd believes she wrote at least 30 more, because some have been lost. Her specialty, one that was in part imposed upon her, were miniature forms. More than half of her works are lieder or art songs, settings of poems for singer and accompanist, and they are performed more frequently than anything else she wrote.

Another 125 or so are works for the piano. Among them is an hourlong set of works titled Das Jahr (The Year), one for each month, plus an epilogue. “This is the piece that really needs to be rediscovered and played by the great pianists,” Todd said. “It hasn’t quite yet happened, but I suspect that it will as more attention is turned to her music.”

At the same time, Hensel did take on some larger-form works, including a piano quartet, orchestral overture and some Bach-influenced cantatas. Of special note is her first-rate string quartet, which she wrote in 1834; it is not clear whether it was performed in her lifetime.