Introduction

This chapter provides an overview of the book as a whole. It opens with a brief history of Hensel studies—starting with the rediscovery of Hensel in the 1980s, leading through the growth of Hensel scholarship toward the end of the twentieth century, and ending with the current state of affairs—and argues that we need to understand Hensel’s music better. It then outlines some of the book’s guiding principles—including a belief in power of music analysis to access and communicate the wonders of Hensel’s songs and a commitment to exploring Hensel’s songs within its many diverse contexts—and explains the book’s overall organization around these contexts.

“You too may change”

By and large, discussions on tonal pairing have been limited to works of the late nineteenth century whose competing key centers are a third apart. Even when we find tonal pairing earlier in the nineteenth century, the tonic is still most frequently in conflict with the mediant or the submediant. This chapter addresses a tonal pairing strategy found in certain songs by Fanny Hensel where the tonic is paired not with a third-related key but instead with the subdominant. In these cases, Hensel effectively transforms the tonic into V of iv, such that the subdominant key competes with, and even sometimes usurps, the tonic key. Using “Vorwurf” and “Die Äolsharfe auf dem Schlosse zu Baden” as examples, the author explores the harmonic strategies by which Hensel turns the tonic into V of iv, and the expressive implications that arise as the tonic’s function transforms is transformed in this way.

Women’s Private Cosmopolitanism in Literary Translation and Song

This chapter considers the ways in which Fanny Hensel’s Drei Lieder nach Heine von Mary Alexander (unpublished, 1830) can be understood as part of cosmopolitan practices among elite women in the nineteenth century. In 1833, Mary Alexander, who wrote letters to Hensel in Berlin using her imperfect German from London, translated poems 1, 4, and 27 from Heinrich Heine’s Die Heimkehr into English. Hensel responded with her own settings of the English-language poems which she composed in Berlin and sent back to Alexander, working in a language she had only recently acquired. Aspects of both Alexander’s engagement with the German language and Hensel’s engagement with English show the ways in which both women intermingled cultures and language in their own textual practices. Hensel’s musical settings of Alexander’s translations show further evidence of an essentially cosmopolitan play between English, Scottish, and German musical and poetic traces.

The Wilderness at Home

Fanny Hensel’s songs on the theme of the German Romantic forest emphasize the transportive and emotive functions of music in Waldromantik (woods-romanticism) literature. In works by Joseph von Eichendorff and Ludwig Tieck, music announces the merging of the woods with the supernatural or the transcendent and also suggests human bewilderment or ecstasy in the midst of that experience. This chapter shows how, in “Morgenständchen” and the Anklänge cycle, Hensel accordingly centers her songs on the texts’ moments of sonic revelation, and creates a sense of expansiveness through harmonic adventurousness, dramatic ascents, textural juxtapositions, and musical allusions. Furthermore, these songs extend the worlds of their texts by providing glimpses of the unknown or by suggesting that domestic music performances are themselves implicated in the narrative. By enfolding distant realms into the home, these songs might be understood as subtly defying the gendered containment of domestic music culture.

Songs of Travel

The impact of gender on freedom is vividly conveyed by Fanny Hensel’s letter to her cousin Marianne from the Saint Gotthard Pass in 1822, on a family trip: I spent a day . . . I’ll keep forever in my heart, and will remember with emotion for a long time to come. . . . [I] was observing, on the Italian border, the finest, most gracious, and pleasant scene that man can imagine when destiny cried out to me: so far, and no further! . . . If I had been a young lad of sixteen yesterday, my God! I would have had to fight against committing some great folly.” As Felix’s career acquired an international perspective, Fanny craved his descriptions of foreign parts. The motif of travel was threaded through her life—whether as reality, dream, or vicarious experience. Also threaded through her life was her production of songs belonging to the categories of “songs of travel,” portraying journeying, wandering, and remote locations, whether reached or imagined. Immersed in such texts, Hensel was free to “travel” in her mind’s eye. This chapter offers close analytical and critical readings of the words and music of songs such as Hensel’s “Schwanenlied,” Op. 1, No. 1, “Gondellied,” Op. 1, No. 6, and “Bergeslust,” Op. 10, No. 5, in an effort to illuminate how the Lied (as a small, apparently enclosed genre) allowed Hensel to widen the horizons beyond her enclosed life.

“In this elusive language”

That composers of vocal music respond to verbal sound and rhythm has become a matter of analysis both by literary and musical scholars. Perhaps influenced by Goethe’s admiration for the brief comet that was Byron, Fanny Hensel studied his poetry in order to improve her English; in early 1837, she set three of his poems to music in English. She could not, she told her brother in 1834, quite understand the sense of the poetry but was captivated by the sounds and rhythms. Here, I consider both Byron’s word-music and his treatment of rhythm in the first song, “There be none of Beauty’s daughters,” and Hensel’s musical responses to his subtleties. I also discuss other features of this song, including a possible reference to Mozart’s “Voi che sapete,” and speculate that she might have read Wilhelm Müller’s biography of Byron in her quest for further information about him.

Fanny Hensel’s Lieder (ohne Worte) and the Boundaries of Song

The subject of this chapter, Fanny Hensel’s Lied in D♭ major for piano solo, Op. 8, No. 3, might seem an anomalous choice for a volume devoted to the composer’s texted Lieder. But one could readily advance the argument that, like Schubert, Hensel was at her core a naturally gifted song composer who gave as free a rein to lyrical impulses in her purely instrumental music as she did in setting the verses of her favorite poets—Goethe, Tieck, Eichendorff, and Heine. Some of her piano pieces, which she typically titled Lieder or Klavierlieder, raise the question as to whether particular poetic sources lay behind their inspiration. Perhaps the most enigmatic of these examples is Op. 8, No. 3, which, when published posthumously in 1850, appeared with the title Lied, to which was added in parentheses “Lenau.” This chapter takes into account the sixteen Lenau settings composed by Hensel and her brother between 1839 and 1847, and considers whether Op. 8, No. 3 might be linked to specific verses of Lenau, or might offer, perhaps, a musical portrait of the poet, who suffered a mental collapse in 1844.

Waldszenen and Abendbilder

Nikolaus Lenau (1802–1850) is often described as Germany’s greatest poet of Weltschmerz. In his poetry, Lenau steadily invoked Nature and, in particular, the figure of the forest (der Wald), as both a reflection and amplification of his prevailing poetic mood. Fanny Hensel found inspiration in Lenau’s poetry toward the end of her life, setting seven of his poems in the 1840s. This chapter offers close readings of six of those settings, grouped into those that deploy forest imagery in varying degrees (“Vorwurf,” “Kommen und Scheiden,” and “Traurige Wege”) and those that describe or address the evening (“Bitte” and “Abendbild”). Throughout, the emphasis will be on Hensel’s harmonic, melodic, rhythmic, and textural strategies for capturing and coloring Lenau’s merger of nature and melancholy.

Reading Poetry Through Music

In an extension of Stephen Rodgers’s efforts to turn “an analytical lens” on Fanny Hensel, this chapter focuses on selected Hensel settings whose texts have also inspired other composers: “Verlust” after Heine (“Und wüssten’s die Blumen”), also set by Robert Schumann and Robert Franz; “Frühling” (Eichendorff) with Schumann’s and Curschmann’s “Frühlingsnacht” as companions; and “Du bist die Ruh” (Rückert), also set by Schubert (and many others). In order to avoid comparing stylistically incompatible settings, the selection has been limited to Lieder between ca. 1825 and ca. 1850. Taking stock of Hensel’s interpretations and comparing them with those of other composers will allow musicologists and music theorists to assess her place in the history of the Lied in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Working with Words

Fanny Hensel was attentive to declamation, with respect to both correct accentuation and text expression. Her song autographs at the Mendelssohn Archive of the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin provide ample evidence for her meticulous, yet creative and artistic approach to declamation. The autographs contain numerous examples of her honing of text underlay, with the apparent aim of achieving optimal metrical placement of syllables, words, and lines, and/or of expressing the meaning of the poem. She experiments with the elongation of particular words or lines, with the metrical placement of individual words, and even with the metrical placement of entire texts. The chapter discusses numerous relevant song excerpts and complete songs, many of them unpublished.