Posted on 07/01/2025 10:08:18 AM PDT by DollyCali
(left to right) Mylife, Tongue Tied, and Me!
Having lobster rolls @ Reds Eats.
Here's their web site: https://www.redseatsmaine.com/
I miss all of those faces. I’m so glad you’re still here, MS. B. Love this pic! ♥️
Great pix MsB!!!
Memories
MyLife did many food threads here Miss those
Musicians past n present. Enthusiasts
The is was an interesting read to me as a fan of his(her?) work
~~<>~~
She composed more than 460 works of astonishing quality. Her brother published some of them under his own name. Years later, he had to confess the truth to the Queen of England.
Berlin, 1842. One of Europe’s most celebrated composers stood inside Buckingham Palace, summoned to perform for a monarch who adored music. **Felix Mendelssohn** was at the height of his fame, praised across the continent, welcomed into royal salons, treated as a living genius.
**Queen Victoria** was delighted. She told him she wanted to sing her favorite of his songs. Then she began performing “Italien,” confidently, proudly, as if offering him a gift.
Felix turned red.
He had to interrupt the Queen.
With visible discomfort, he explained that he had not written the song. It belonged to his sister.
Her name was **Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel**.
That moment, brief and awkward, captures one of the most infuriating stories in the history of classical music. A composer of extraordinary ability, whose work circulated the highest levels of European culture, yet whose name was systematically erased, even by the person closest to her.
Fanny was born in 1805 into a wealthy, educated Jewish family in Hamburg. The Mendelssohns valued culture deeply. They hired excellent teachers. They believed in discipline, intellect, and refinement. Four years later, Felix was born, and it quickly became clear that both children were remarkable.
They studied music together. Practiced side by side. Composed from a young age. Family letters and diaries make one thing clear: Fanny was not the lesser talent. In fact, Felix later admitted she was the stronger pianist. They shared drafts of their compositions, critiqued each other’s work, and trusted one another’s judgment more than anyone else’s.
For a time, they were equals.
Then adulthood arrived, and with it, the rules.
Their father, Abraham Mendelssohn, was progressive enough to educate his daughter thoroughly, but not progressive enough to imagine her as a professional. When Fanny was fifteen, he wrote her a letter that quietly shut the door on her future.
Music, he said, would be Felix’s profession. His calling. His life.
For Fanny, it could only ever be an ornament.
Something pleasant. Decorative. A skill that enhanced her femininity and marriage prospects, but never the foundation of her identity. Never something public. Never something ambitious.
She was expected to marry, manage a household, raise children, and keep her genius safely contained.
She did not agree. But open rebellion was not an option for a woman of her class in early nineteenth-century Prussia. So she did what many brilliant women have done when denied permission.
She kept working anyway.
She composed constantly. Piano pieces, songs, chamber works, cantatas, large choral pieces. Music of elegance, daring harmony, emotional depth, and technical control. Not as an amateur, not as a dilettante, but as someone who understood music as her native language.
She married Wilhelm Hensel, a painter who supported her more than most men of the era would have. They had a son. She ran a household. And she wrote music at a pace that makes the word “hobby” almost insulting.
By the time of her death, she had composed more than 460 works.
Very few were published under her own name.
Felix’s career, meanwhile, soared. He became one of the most admired composers in Europe, conducting orchestras, receiving commissions, and publishing extensively. He loved his sister. He relied on her. He sought her approval.
And he discouraged her from publishing.
Public exposure, he argued, would harm her reputation. It might invite ridicule. It might reflect badly on the family. Better to keep her music within private salons, among those refined enough to appreciate it.
At least six of her songs were published under his name. She knew it. He knew it. The public did not.
Which is how a Queen of England ended up praising the wrong composer.
Fanny poured her energy into something she could control. Every Sunday, her Berlin home hosted concerts that became legendary. The Sonntagsmusiken drew the city’s cultural elite. Bach, Beethoven, new works, daring ideas. Fanny performed constantly, including her own compositions. Felix’s music too, when he was present.
It was one of the most important musical gatherings in Berlin.
It was also private. Invitation-only. Her genius confined to those who happened to be in the room.
For years, she lived with that compromise.
Then, in her late thirties, something shifted. The weight of suppression grew heavier than the risk of defiance. She began to ask, openly, why her music should remain hidden. Why her name should not appear on her own work.
In 1846, at the age of forty, she published her first collection under her own name. Six Mélodies for piano, Opus 1.
It was a quiet rebellion, but a decisive one.
The reception was positive. She began preparing more works for publication. For the first time, she was planning a public future.
She never got to live it.
On May 14, 1847, while rehearsing for one of her Sunday concerts, Fanny suffered a stroke. She died that evening. She was forty-one years old.
Felix was shattered. Friends wrote that he never recovered. Six months later, he too was dead, at thirty-eight.
History remembered him.
Her music slipped into silence.
For more than a century, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel existed as a footnote. The gifted sister. The domestic woman who chose not to pursue a career. A convenient lie that spared society from confronting what it had denied her.
Only in the late twentieth century did scholars begin to uncover the full scope of her work. Manuscripts were published. Performers began programming her music. Recordings appeared.
What emerged was not a curiosity, but a master.
Her songs show extraordinary sensitivity to text and harmony. Her piano works are inventive and emotionally complex. Her larger compositions reveal ambition and command equal to her contemporaries.
She had always belonged in the canon. She had simply been barred from entering it.
Her story is not rare. It is representative.
How many composers like her never survived history because their work was unpublished, misattributed, or dismissed before it could live? How many women were told their genius was ornamental? How much art was lost because permission was never granted?
Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel kept composing anyway. She created relentlessly in a world that refused to make space for her. She claimed her name at the end, even knowing how little time she had left.
Queen Victoria’s favorite song was hers.
The world is finally learning what it should have known all along.
Not Felix’s talented sister.
Fanny Hensel. Composer.
There is a similar story with Clara Wieck Schumann, wife of Robert Schumann.
Our Local choral group perforned one of Fanny’s Works, about the Biblical Job.
It was superb!
It was on the same bill as Mozart’s requiem, and didn’t suffer too much in comparison.
Of Course, ANYTHING would suffer in comparison to Mozart’s Requiem! LOL.
Oh, I miss them, too!
“ I’m so glad you’re still here, MS. B.”
Gosh, me too!
Thanks-*HUG*
I was just looking through some old photos from one
of my keepsake boxes, and thinking of old times.
Life passes by so fast!
*sigh*
Cant sleep so instead of tossing snd turning watching FB BGT REELS. And because of heavy cloud cover I’m m actually getting them with one bar!
Here’s one i loved. I think you will too
Malakai Bayoh sang Andrew Lloyd Webber’s classic hymn, “Pie Jesu,” for His first audition
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1CoBWEgXDK/?mibextid=wwXIfr
Great cartoon—and so true.
Thanks.
This could be a truly great year—or a terrible one—or a little of both.
Sorry, meant that for Jemian
But hope you’re having a good day too.
Those lobster rolls had my mouth watering
Yes, every day can be very different. Today, I’m not as uplifted as Thursday, but not as depressed as yesterday.
I was told I need to get out of bed and move around. I can do the getting part, but the moving part is beyond me.
Today’s fun side effect is nausea. I have a medicine for that. So far, so good.
I told my nurse orienter person that if I do have nausea or diarhea, I’m not taking anything to stop it for 10 or 15 pounds. I might as well put this misery to good use.
“I’m not taking anything to stop it for 10 or 15 pounds. I might as well put this misery to good use.”
LOL, you’re funny!
I lost about 15 lb this last year with all my issues. But not in a good way, now I feel really fragile and need to gain muscle back. So I want to keep the weight off, maybe another 10 more, but I need to do it all exercising.
So don’t overdo it!
I have a couple of other old lady friends that have lost a significant amount of weight quickly, and now they just look elderly. And fragile. They think they look great, but I don’t think you can do that over 60 without consequences. Go slow! Eat protein when you feel good enough to eat something!
That is exactly something Teega would do!
He gave me a little sandpaper kiss a little while ago..
He’s just like a little kid sometimes.
You know. like giving you a kiss, and then
you hear a distant crash in the kitchen!
My niece did that once.
This is what she said:
“Every thing is fine” she called out.
“It was just a accident!”
When I went into the kitchen, I found her covered in flour from head to toe!
Also, every single pot and pan we own was on the floor
beside her.
Thank goodness it was summer!
I told her “If i put you in the bathtub, we could make a gravy!”
I hosed her off outside, THEN put her in the bath tub!
She is now in her 40’s!
Red’s Eats puts the meat from an entire lobster in those lobstah rolls!
Mighty good eatin;, right sissy?
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