Fanny Hensel’s piano cycle Das Jahr (The Year) is a musical diary of her travels in Italy throughout 1839-40. With 12 works to represent the 12 months, such a concept was entirely novel in 1841 (Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons came later in 1876). The 1841 version of ‘June’ is a warm serenade imitating the gentle strums of a guitar - ‘imitando la chittaro’ - before blossoming into glittering virtuosity. The facsimiles of the final version bear great visual appeal; her artist husband Wilhelm had supplied vignettes for each ‘month’. Like most of her works, Das Jahr was published posthumously (1989). The Mendelssohn family had reservations about upper-class women working in a public sphere. The large-scale conception and traces of symphonic thinking in Das Jahr are also present within Hensel’s sonatas, revealing a composer whose talent and ambitions transcended the space she was allowed to access.
Programme notes © 2022 by Ning Hui See. Please do not reproduce without the author's permission.
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