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This is the first of two introductory chapters; it covers aspects of poetic meter and rhythm, introduces declamatory‐schema analysis, and compares Nägeli's notion of “polyrhythm” in the Lied (in an article from 1817) with recent approaches to song analysis (Cone and Hoeckner). Declamatory schemas specify the placement of poetic feet and lines in a given musical meter. A survey of declamatory schemas in Hensel's Opp. 1 and 7 collections, Schubert's Winterreise, and Schumann's Dichterliebe is provided. It has been assumed that there is a simple default for setting tetrameter lines; this chapter shows that tetrameter schemas vary both within and among songs. Declamatory‐schema analysis also extends pioneering work by Fehn and Hallmark on pentameter line settings. The focus here is on rhythm and meter in the poetry and vocal lines; chapter 2 adds piano accompaniments.

This is the first of five chapters on the songs of individual composers. Whereas narrative accounts of the nineteenth‐century Lied typically begin with Franz Schubert, here phrase expansion, hypermeter, elision, and rhythmic flow in songs by Fanny Hensel née Mendelssohn provide a point of departure. Hensel's songs provide a link with the volkstümlich tradition of the eighteenth century (she studied with Zelter and knew Goethe personally), and they reflect changes in the genre through the 1840s. Issues of gender and class in are discussed in relation to the songs and their publication history. The analyses focus on the six songs of the Op. 1 collection and the first of the Op. 7 collection with settings of poems by Heine, Goethe, Eichendorff, and Geibel. Phrase rhythms are compared across this set of songs, and links with poetic form and meaning are revealed.

For five years, Wilhelm Hensel had pursued an elusive goal in Rome as he completed his training and strove to produce work worthy of an artist, durable paintings on grand historical, biblical subjects. The path to finding his identity had not been easy or direct; continually pressed by financial straits, he struggled to provide for his mother in her declining years, and he was compelled to work in Italy without being able to share his experiences with Fanny Hensel. Indeed, by October 1828, the end of his Italian tenure, prospects for marrying her must have seemed as uncertain as on the eve of his departure in July 1823. In Fanny's idealized vision, sibling and matrimonial love would thus form a perfect alliance as she became Frau Hensel. It was, perhaps, a notion no less sentimental than the floral wreaths with which Wilhelm's portraits adorned his bride.

That sibling rivalry was a possible motivating factor for Fanny Hensel to write a piano quartet might explain some similarities between the slow movements of the siblings’ compositions, both of which fall into a ternary ABA form, with a lyrical opening in the major followed by an agitated, contrasting middle section in the minor. Still, the “competition” between the siblings took an incontrovertible turn in 1823 and 1825. As it happened, it was the birthday of Wilhelm Hensel, who had prepared for Fanny's departure by turning to poetry and confiding to her these lachrymose verses. Fanny responded by setting them as a song in a style of slow lament. By composing the song in December 1822, Fanny, in effect, now assumed the poetic persona, just months before Wilhelm's departure for Italy and the beginning of a new five-year separation.

For Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, the loss of Fanny Hensel was a crushing blow from which he never recovered. With her passing, he confided to Karl Klingemann, his entire youth had disappeared, and he found himself wandering about as if halfway in a dream. Felix returned with his family to Leipzig in the mid-September after her death. After a week he made the difficult journey to Berlin, but the sight of Fanny's rooms, unchanged since her death, utterly unnerved him. Presumably what he saw upon entering her music study was the scene Julius Helfft captured in a watercolor drawing of 1849. There Fanny's piano appears with its lid closed, and an empty music stand behind it; adorning the walls are Wilhelm Hensel's paintings, and on a table we see Fanny's crucifix. Through windows behind it light streams diagonally over potted plants, images of life in an otherwise uninhabited room.

The production of Die Hochzeit des Camacho at the Königliches Schauspielhaus in Berlin in April 1827 brought irritations, frustrations, and disappointments to Felix Mendelssohn. In his account, Sebastian Hensel cites the narrow-mindedness of the manager, the intrigues behind the curtain, and the often annoying business with the actors and rehearsals that accompanied the opera's production. The experience apparently had a profound and long-lasting effect on Mendelssohn, deepening his dislike of Berlin. Ludwig Rellstab claimed that the opera was the work of an inexperienced composer, while the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung journal published a critical review.

Little is known about Fanny Hensel's early years in Hamburg. The first notice about her is a letter, written by Abraham Mendelssohn Bartholdy to his mother-in-law the day after Fanny's birth, reporting the difficulties of Lea Mendelssohn Bartholdy's labor but also her prophetic maternal observation—their daughter had “Bach fugal fingers”. Some three years later, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy's arrival in February 1809, prompted more comparisons: the son, Lea informed her Viennese cousin Henriette von Pereira Arnstein, promised to be “more pretty” than Fanny, an allusion to a slight orthopedic deformity inherited from her grandfather Moses Mendelssohn. At age three and a half, she was reading her letters plainly and purposefully fabricating phrases with clarity and coherence. At age six, Fanny was innocent enough of these worldly affairs, though she evidently was beginning to correspond with her aunt Henriette in Paris, who described the child's writing as “really the second edition of all the maternal talent”.

In 1819, though Fanny Hensel was certainly the more advanced pianist of the two, around this time her parents made the decision to promote Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy's musical training. Thus, on Lea Mendelssohn Bartholdy's initiative, in May, Felix began violin lessons as a surprise for Abraham Mendelssohn Bartholdy, then in Paris, and in August, Aunt Henriette von Pereira Arnstein sent word from there of some special presents he was bringing home for the children—for Fanny a necklace of Scottish jewels, but for Felix writing implements with which he might compose his first opera. There is no mention of similar encouragements for Fanny. Instead, in 1819 one begins to see the parents’ expectations for the two divide: if Felix's musical world might encompass the very public realm of the opera house, Fanny's domain would remain relatively private, centered on domestic, intimate forms of music making—piano pieces and songs.

The passing of Bella Salomon—daughter of Daniel Itzig, matriarch of the Mendelssohns’ wealth, and, in her declining years, mother reconciled through Fanny Hensel with her apostate son—precipitated a momentous event for her granddaughter. Upon reviewing the deceased's will, Lea Mendelssohn Bartholdy and Abraham Mendelssohn Bartholdy discovered that Bella Salomon had bequeathed a fortune of 150,000 thalers, comprising among other assets the residence at Neue Promenade and the old Meierei, to Jacob Bartholdy, the children of two granddaughters, and Lea's unborn grandchildren. As a result, the Mendelssohns could remain at Neue Promenade no. 7 only by purchasing or renting it. Instead, Abraham began searching for a new residence and found it in an 18th-century baroque mansion imposing enough but deteriorating from neglect—Leipzigerstrasse no. 3, near the Leipzigerplatz, Fanny's principal residence from 1825 until her death in 1847.

For Fanny Hensel's twenty-eighth birthday, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy finished a landscape painting and a major new composition, the Fair Melusine Overture, op. thirty-two. However, Felix, ever the perfectionist, could not yet bring himself to part with his score, about the fabled mermaid who assumes human form while with her knightly lover. So he continued to fuss over the music, even though, as he put it, might rot in the aridity of self-criticism. Not until February 1834 did Fanny receive her present. She herself would offer some suggestions and perhaps hasten Felix's decision to recast the score, but her first reaction was the most poignant, for it again underscored the divide between two musical geniuses—one an international celebrity in Düsseldorf, the other a lady musician of leisure in Berlin—and Fanny's secret aspirations as a composer.

Admittedly, during the previous decade, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy had already engaged Ludwig van Beethoven's music in a series of compositions. Writing to Felix, Fanny Hensel observed that her brother had successfully worked his way through Beethoven's late style and “progressed beyond it”, while she stuck in it. Turning her critical gaze inward, she then made this remarkable statement: “It's not so much a certain way of composing that is lacking as it is a certain approach to life, and as a result of this shortcoming, my lengthy things die in their youth of decrepitude”. Fanny thus felt keenly the tension in her music between the brief, epigrammatic art song, in which she could compress musical meaning into a few, “pretty” ideas, and her attempts at larger compositions, with all the requisite trappings of thematic development and formal elaboration.

The concept of the demonic influence had figured prominently in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's works, especially in the closing sections of his autobiographical Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth), where the poet wrestled with an irresistible, demonic Wesen (presence), inherently neither good nor evil, that had profound impact on human behavior. Goethe found the demonic in world events—the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755, the reigns of Frederick II and Napoleon Bonaparte, and the sweeping revolutionary forces that had fundamentally transfigured Europe during his long life. For Fanny Hensel, the demonic affected her private, musical world; like some poeticus furor, it evidently came over her when, following her brother's advice, she composed piano instead of choral music. To her mind, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy was the source of this power, and the sibling bond could not be severed.

As 1839 neared its end, the Hensels celebrated Christmas by fabricating a tree from cypress, orange, and myrtle branches. The papal services left Fanny Hensel unexpectedly nostalgic for Berlin—instead of a sizeable choir and orchestra, even if of average quality, a small cohort of musicians offered thin, wafting chants soon lost in the vast recesses of St. Peter’s. Fanny divulged to Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy that at the pope's entrance into the Sistine Chapel on Christmas Eve the musicians broke into a fugal passage, allying sacred polyphony with the centuries-old authority of the church. Fanny returned to composition in February and March 1840 and quickly produced a miniature a cappella trio. Each introduction adumbrates the thematic material of the linked Allegro. Thus, a descending figure treated in imitative counterpoint undergoes transformations to generate the swirling, descending sixteenth-note patterns of the ensuing Capriccio in B Minor.

Within weeks after returning to Berlin, the Hensels found themselves stuck in the “prose” of domestic life; their familiar Berlin surroundings were no match for the poetry of Italy. The accession of Frederick William IV to the Prussian throne in June 1840 had ushered in the prospect of fundamental changes, including vague promises of a constitution, but Fanny Hensel remained wary and skeptical, as her diary reveals. Invoking a divine right to rule Prussia as a Christian state, the king resorted to pseudomedieval constructs and even considered reviving the feudalistic, romantic Order of the Swan, which Fanny later dismissed as sentimental nonsense. In September and October 1840, some 60,000 Berliners swore oaths of fealty to a monarch enthroned in a display of pageantry and knighthood that “shook Berlin to its core”, though Fanny wondered why the opportunity had not been taken to do something for the poor.

By composing music for the first scene (H-U 389), Fanny effectively brought Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's verses out of the private library into the realm of “public” music making. To that end, she sent a copy to Franz Hauser and asked him to consider performing her setting with his Singverein in Vienna, so that she might join his “league”. Fanny Hensel confessed that she had envisioned the work with orchestral accompaniment but, limited by her own “dilettantism”, had not orchestrated the piano part: “Actually the piece should be set with orchestra; it was so conceived, but there again you have the joys of dilettantism: first of all, I write very poorly for orchestra, and second, even if it were a masterpiece, I would always have to perform it from the piano-vocal version, and so I spared myself the effort, and the score belongs to many of my deeds that will remain unfinished”.

Robert von Keudell looms especially large in Fanny Hensel's biography because he apparently played the critical role of convincing her late in life to begin publishing under her own name, the final step toward her artistic self-fulfillment that Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy had been unwilling to support. Keudell provided encouragement and, what is more, substantive critical advice as she began selecting her best music for publication. Fanny devoted 1846 to exploring and working exclusively on small-scale genres. By composing three series of piano pieces, lieder, and part-songs, she revealed a new determination to treat her art as a disciplined craft. Her process of self-discovery as a professional composer would lead first through the smaller genres, as she began to consider the musical public beyond Leipzigerstrasse no. 3, and emerged to the public as Fanny Hensel the composer.