Fanny: The Other Mendelssohn
Felix Mendelssohn’s sister receives due recognition in Sheila Hayman’s film, a documentary not just for music lovers.
This is an engaging film that possesses wider appeal than might be assumed. The commitment of Sheila Hayman who wrote, produced and directed is special in that it derives from something that could not be more personal. That's because the subject of this film is the composer Fanny Mendelssohn who is Hayman's great- great-great grandmother. Her previous work has largely been for television, but this is a full-length feature (97 minutes) and it's a work that attracts on three levels.
Lovers of classical music will, of course, immediately recognise the value of a biographical study of Fanny Mendelssohn. But, since she lived from 1805 to 1847 and died leaving some 467 compositions, her story would appeal too to anyone ready to applaud a woman who exercised her skills regardless of the circumscribed lives of females in those days. In this respect the film sums her up as being a very modern woman who happened to live two centuries ago. By keeping up her art and doing so even after becoming a married woman and a mother, she was defying the expectations of the Mendelssohn-Bartholdy family to which she belonged. Indeed, when it came to getting her music published, she was even going against the advice of her famous brother, Felix, who had in earlier days encouraged her gift for writing music. One of the details that emerges in this film is the fact that at the age of thirteen Fanny composed a song for her father's birthday, a sign not merely of her being a precocious child but of the talent that was already starting to appear.
By viewing Fanny in the context of the society in which she lived, Hayman’s film offers a timely portrait of a woman who, if not quite written out of history, is now a figure worthy of note and someone to be applauded by all regardless of whether or not they have any particular enjoyment of classical music. The film is admirably informative but avoids becoming too much of a feminist diatribe. Indeed, Fanny’s tale throws up a hero in the form of her husband Wilhelm Hensel who was also advanced for his times in that he was strongly supportive of his wife in all her musical endeavours.
Interesting as Fanny’s life is, telling it on screen in documentary form can be thought of as challenging since with its necessary use of talking heads in the form of artists, musicologists and the like whose words unveil her life in chronological order it might have emerged as a rather dry work. Indeed, save for a few scenes featuring silhouettes, there are no attempted dramatic reconstructions but any risk of the material coming over in a way that feels too academic is neatly sidestepped. That's because alongside the biography Hayman gives us another and more recent tale. This takes the form of a fascinating and complex hunt undertaken in recent years to unearth the missing manuscript of a piece composed in 1828 called the Easter Sonata, a four-movement piano work originally thought to have been composed by Felix Mendelssohn. The aim was both to locate it and to prove that the composer was actually Fanny and this venture provides the film with a forward-moving dramatic thread not unlike a detective story.
Fanny: The Other Mendelssohn also has the appeal of featuring the celebrated young pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason who in 2022 would, as we see, give the Easter Sonata a public performance in Birmingham. Much earlier, at a time before the manuscript of it disappeared, the French pianist Éric Heidsieck had made a recording of it and we find the producer of that record, Henri-Jacques Coudert pronouncing the work a masterpiece but adding that he is certain that it was written by Felix and not by Fanny because it is "very masculine, very violent".
We don't hear all of the sonata but enough of it and of other compositions by Fanny to be persuaded that she had real talent and an ability to compose with emotional depth. Consequently, the film serves the purpose of encouraging its viewers to seek out recordings of her work having heard enough here, however incomplete, to recognise its quality. The opening few minutes of Fanny: The Other Mendelssohn plays like a trailer or a promo but features people not immediately identified and that makes it the weakest section. Once past that, however, the film works very well indeed on all its levels and it is certainly worth seeking out.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Featuring Iwata Kanneh-Mason, Sheila Hayman, Marcia Citron, Angela R. Mace, Alison Langer, Éric Heidsieck, Anna Beer, Chi-Chi Nwanoku, Sarah Rothenberg, R. Larry Todd, Tim Parker-Langston, Henri-Jacques Coudert, Robert Owen Lehman, Marie Rolf, Roland Schmidt-Hensel, Robinson McClellan, Sheku Kanneh-Mason.
Dir Sheila Hayman, Pro Sheila Hayman, Screenplay Sheila Hayman, Ph Hannah Engelson, Lynda Hall, Benedict Mirow, Beatrice Ní Bhroin and others, Ed Evelyn Franks.
Mercury Studios-Dartmouth Films.
97 mins. UK. 2023. UK Rel: 27 October 2023. Cert. PG.
