‘Music for you must only be an ornament’: how Fanny Mendelssohn’s voice was stifled, then saved

To read the family’s account, you’d never know that Fanny Mendelssohn, Felix’s big sister, was also a composer of genius. Her own son, my great-great-grandfather Sebastian, paints a vivid picture of her in his history of the family: funny, brilliant, affectionate. But not a word about her as a musician.

So it was not until I made a film about Felix for the BBC in 2009 that I began to discover Fanny’s extraordinary gifts; and also, her lifelong struggle between a desire for self-expression and the horror of upsetting the family. What made it even more compelling was that, for Fanny, the struggle was largely with herself. And that was the start of my documentary Fanny: The Other Mendelssohn.

Today, 176 years