The final chapter examines Hensel’s own creative response in the medium of chamber music: the D minor Piano Trio, written over a decade later and (unlike the quartet) published soon after her untimely death. The trio is formally more restrained than the quartet, yet has numerous points in common. I then discuss the quartet’s modern reception since its rediscovery in the early 1980s, before outlining the bigger ‘take away’ points of this study. Hensel’s quartet points to a fascinating and almost unknown avenue of early Beethoven reception. It also shows – for better and for worse – the interaction between two prodigiously talented siblings, and how music, its internal allusions and resonances, could function as a means of intimate communication between close family and friends. This recently discovered work reveals not only the voices that were all but silenced but of paths not taken by music history, of avenues left unexplored or not fully developed.

This chapter outlines the specific compositional genesis of the quartet and its private reception during and immediately following its creation. I first discuss the basis of the quartet in an unfinished piano sonata from 1829, and its compositional process in the early 1830s, before turning to some of the possible motivations for writing a string quartet in this period. The last part of the chapter concerns the somewhat-notorious exchange between Hensel and her brother carried out over the winter of 1834–5. In a letter of 30 January 1835, Mendelssohn offered a critique of the quartet, objecting to Hensel’s use of form, specifically her free use of modulation and music that is in places ‘in no key at all’. Hensel’s response – perhaps unnecessarily deferential – is a revealing acknowledgement of how she felt she remained in thrall to Beethoven’s later music.

Providing strong contrast with the previous movements, the finale initially seems tonally and formally unambiguous, starting out as a (sonata-) rondo structure. However, the new episode introduced in the development section threatens to take over the design, and the overemphatic use of C minor here points back to unresolved intermovement elements. Indeed, the movement is characterised by an increasing freedom from generic form, with the desynchronising of harmonic and thematic recapitulation points, the secondary material being not recapitulated, and the reprise effectively becoming a culminatory coda. This exhilarating movement reveals some precedent in the finale of Mendelssohn’s Octet (also in E flat, 1825) but takes its own direction.

The brief introduction situates Hensel’s String Quartet within the course of her compositional development, showing its significance here and its implications for understanding her modern reception. The string quartet genre held an enormous prestige in Hensel’s time, and the creation of this composition was implicitly a gesture showcasing her worth outside the ‘feminine’ sphere of solo lied and piano miniature. I also explain the position of this book within current, developing positions in the discussion of the music of female composers. This issue is especially pointed in this instance given the intimate relation and two-way interaction between the music of Fanny Hensel and her younger brother, Felix Mendelssohn. Hensel’s quartet makes an intriguing case study: its absence of significant reception history forces us to concentrate more on the actual music rather than what has been said about it.

This chapter fills in the background to the composition of the string quartet in 1834. First, we look at Hensel’s early musical education, her intimate creative ties with her brother Felix Mendelssohn, their mutual use of music as a form of intimate communication, and the asymmetrical career path that resulted from her being a woman in contemporaneous society. In parallel to this sibling influence runs the Mendelssohns’ reception of late Beethoven in the 1820s, whose influence on their works of the later 1820s is clear and also has a major bearing on Hensel’s quartet. A final case study showcasing both the interaction with her brother and the music of Beethoven is provided by a brief analysis of the ‘Easter’ Sonata of 1828, which points forward to many features of the string quartet.

Intriguingly, Hensel’s opening Adagio ma non troppo is not in a conventional first-movement sonata form at all but rather a lyrical fantasia on a small group of thematic ideas. Hensel’s opening idea, alluding to Mendelssohn’s overture Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, is reharmonised or reworked every time it appears. Only at the end, though, does it cadence to the tonic. Despite its apparently free, fantasia-like elaboration of material, there is nonetheless a persuasive logic to Hensel’s design, which can be brought out by applying the Henselian ‘schemata’ recently identified by Stephen Rodgers to the movement. Finally the chapter considers the hermeneutic potential of the movement’s references to the music of Hensel’s brother, returning to Cornelia Bartsch’s idea of ‘music as communication’.

The expressive heart of the quartet, the third-movement Romanze is marked throughout by pronounced harmonic ambivalence and formal fluidity, picking up the tonal instability heard at the end of the preceding movement. Written in a G minor signature, the ostensible tonic is continually undercut by its subdominant C minor, and even the G major sonority at the end of the movement leaves the matter not entirely resolved. Once again, manuscripts show substantial revisions to parts of the movement: indeed, it appears that Hensel clarified certain moments of tonal articulation in order, almost paradoxically, to increase the sense of tonal ambiguity.

Perhaps the most fecund and brilliant movement, the C minor Allegretto is a formally remarkable scherzo with a lengthy trio that takes over the bulk of the movement, leading to a greatly curtailed reprise. Hensel’s manuscript shows that the initially clear ternary design of the movement was manipulated by both intercutting two-bar snippets of the scherzo material into the development of the trio and excising the reprise of the opening bars of the scherzo, thus surreptitiously initiating the reprise amidst the ongoing trio. This leads to the dissolution of the scherzo and a tonally unstable close that prepares the world of the following movement.