The story of the rediscovery of Fanny Hensel’s Easter Sonata for piano and the sterling work done by Angela Mace Christian in uncovering its true authorship has been well-covered elsewhere. Released in 1972 as a recording of a Sonata de Pâques by Felix Mendelssohn and played by Eric Heidsieck, it took many years and travel between two continents before Mace’s detective work eventually confirmed in 2012 that this work was indeed the lost Hensel sonata. (The work was written in 1828, before Hensel’s marriage, so again the thorny issue of nomenclature for women raises itself. I tend to call her Hensel simply as the name she called herself for half her life, and perhaps thus the most recognisable to the composer herself. I am also uncomfortable with our tendency to choose the more well-known name, so that Fanny is known by her brother’s name, and Clara by her husband’s.) Mace was able to see the manuscript before it vanished into private ownership in 2014, and her resulting edition is available free of charge, in an wonderful act of generosity by Mace to performers, audiences, and to Hensel herself. This can be found here.
The sonata was written between Easter and June in 1828, and gains a mention in Hensel’s diary on 13 April 1829, in one of her typically whirlwind entries:
“On Friday at 4 we got up, Hensel came at 5, at 6:30 they left. I had been upstairs with Felix for so long, helping him get dressed and putting the last things away. It was cold, we watched them drive down the street to the east until we could no longer see them. Hensel stayed until 7. After that we went to Marianne’s baptism in the morning. Rosa and I kept little Franz Paul Alexander. At lunchtime mother and I ate alone, Hensel came to dinner, and in the evening brought me a very lovely poem by Felix, which put me in the most pleasant mood, as the melody immediately occurred to me. I played my Easter sonata.”
This was the day that Felix left (again), yet this time, Hensel’s mood is buoyant, clearly through the creativity she feels. I wonder if this was a sign of her own recognition of and pleasure in the skill demonstrated in the sonata? For as the collector and record producer Henri-Jacques Coudert, who found the manuscript in a Paris bookshop in 1970, asserts, the work is indeed a “masterpiece” – and if anyone is in doubt that this is a gendered word, here is the proof, for Coudert means this very literally. This is the reason that the piece must be by the brother, rather than the sister, not to mention that it is “masculine. Very violent.” One rather cringes for him, that such gender stereotyping seems to be the only reason underpinning his conviction.
The Easter story is seen to give the sonata its shape; not literally, perhaps, but in the reflective way that Hensel tended to approach her subject matter (her piano cycle Das Jahr is another example of this). The most explicit moments are the fugue of the slow movement, and the structure of the finale, where the intensity of the opening is “most likely a depiction of the crucifixion”, according to Mace, and gives way to the chorale section on Christe, du Lamm Gottes.
This work has been released in the past few months in an album of Hensel’s piano sonatas, played by Gaia Sokoli, and that recording will be the focus of another post; this review is of another recording of the sonata, released in March 2021. Imagine my delight at two new performances of this wonderful work, both in the same year! And then I looked closer. Turns out, the earlier one is a re-release of Heidsieck’s 1972 recording, this time titled the “world premiere” of Hensel’s sonata. Now, technically that’s true. But I’m a little uncomfortable about this uncontextualized title. It feels to me rather like getting on the bandwagon after enough people are on it to make it look “cool”. After all, back in 1972, would this have been recorded on this label if Hensel’s authorship had been known? If so, where are the other Hensel works, at least the ones that were published and in the public domain at that time (admittedly far fewer than now)? Or works by other women? It’s the curse of releasing online only – we’re missing the explanation, and the acknowledgement of Mace’s work, that doubtless would make me feel better about this, and less that it’s an (unintended) act of appropriation. Nonetheless, it’s well-played – Heidsieck studied with both Wilhelm Kempff and Alfred Cortot, both of whose fingerprints one can hear on the playing – and an interesting recording, not least because it is telling to listen to a Hensel work being played quite literally in a Mendelssohnian style.
The performance brings up several of the differences I hear in how one must approach Hensel’s writing, as opposed to her brother’s. Her phrasing always seems to me much more vocal than his; and given that this sonata was written during rehearsals for the upcoming performance of the St Matthew Passion, it does not seem such a stretch to hear a choral impact on the lines. A case in point is Heidsieck’s instrumental pauses at the tops of phrases, rather than just before, as singers often do in their striving for placement; the repetitions, too, seem to me driven here by the musical line rather than a rhetorical impetus, while the tenor “duettist”2 gets subsumed in the texture, although that might be more a result of 1970s recording aesthetics than anything else. This is not to say that Heidsieck’s choices are displeasing, or unmusical; simply that as mentioned above, it’s interesting to hear a very explicit Mendelssohnian aesthetic imposed on Henselian lines. Even the fugue of the second movement raises vocal questions, here in particular, about where one should breathe in such a insistent texture. I am, yet again, reminded of Hensel’s diary writing, where commas often replace full stops, and ideas rush into the same sentence, all without being at all incomprehensible. In both text and music her phrasing is often unexpected, with overlapping and swerves that are unique to her voice. As always, Hensel gives room here to the performer to make choices about the phrasing, in keeping with their own ways of breathing with the music, just as a singer must, within the compositional parameters. It requires a flexibility that I don’t hear in Mendelssohn, who feels to me much more of an adherent to the external relationship between audible pulse and tactus.
One thing the siblings do feel to me to have in common, however, is an aesthetic around compound time – here the very opening, and the Scherzo. Both have not only a rhythmic similarity with other pieces with the same time signature – I am particularly put in mind of April in Das Jahr – but also a melodic structure.
The continual comparison of Mendelssohn and Hensel highlights our uncomfortable relationship with ideas of influence, authorship and creative authority. There’s a rather poignant video of Angela Mace Christian and pianist Audrey Lam, who gave the first performance of the sonata under Hensel’s name, talking about the cross-influences of both composers on each other, and how one starts to unpick these threads that weave in and out of both. What is Hensel doing, when she asserts her voice? Does her “lack of training” mean that she takes more risks, or is it her own voice showing through? Gilbert and Gubar put it well inThe Madwoman In the Attic:
“If the Queen’s looking-glass speaks with the King’s voice, how do its perpetual kingly admonitions affect the Queen’s own voice? Since his is the chief voice she hears, does the Queen try to sound like the King, imitating his tone, his inflections, his phrasing, his point of view? Or does she “talk back” to him in her own vocabulary, her own timbre, insisting on her own viewpoint?”
Certainly Hensel and Mendelssohn have very differing attitudes to building narrative, both compositionally and in the space they leave for their performers to build sound structures. Hearing the Heidsieck after the 2017 recording by Sofia Gulyak, who has a grounding in Henselian language that the earlier pianist could not, was a fascinating way of delving into this, and one that I recommend. Both are recordings well worth the time spent listening to them.
For the Heidsieck recording, click here.
For the Gulyak recording, click here.