Fanny’s scream
Recently I've been re-reading Marcia Citron's edition of Fanny Hensel's letters to Felix Mendelssohn, and came across a letter from January 1835 where Fanny...
tells Felix she's excited at the prospect of his getting a job in Leipzig (former home of their idol J.S. Bach, and only a single day's travel from Fanny's home in Berlin),
gives Felix some detailed suggested revisions on one of his recent fugues,
and makes some oblique reference to music making, reopening fresh wounds, and then draws this face:
...followed by the explanation "Oh dear, this is supposed to be a face when the young woman [presumably herself] is crying out, but it's impossible to recognize."
Fanny's proto-emoji screaming face is evocative and charming and I love it so much. It speaks directly to my soul.
One little detail I love about this is that much has been made of the fact that Fanny's husband Wilhelm Hensel, while being a phenomenal visual artist, was perhaps the most un-musical person to have ever lived. His lack of musical ability is recorded for posterity on his Wikipedia page:
"... Hensel himself apparently was entirely unmusical: when he participated in the premiere of Felix's Son and Stranger at a private performance honoring the silver anniversary of the Mendelssohn parents in 1829*, despite determined prompting he was unable to sing his part of the mayor, even though it comprised only a few bars of the single note F."
The account is even more brutal on the page for Son and Stranger (aka Die Heimkehr aus der Fremde):
"Die Heimkehr had great success before its original audience, not least because of the mirth ensuing when Hensel, even prompted by humming on all sides, proved unable to sing the single note F that made up his part of the score."
Anyway, I like that Wilhelm's talent for visual art and lack of musicality is an inversion of Fanny's talent for music and lack of skills in visual arts, as evidenced by her little screaming face. (I don't actually think it's bad; I think it's perfect.)
All this to say, I've been obsessed with Fanny's doodle, so I made some special edition 2026 henselpushers merch featuring it, which you can check out or purchase here: https://henselpushers.org/store/fannys-scream
From now through the end of February, I will be donating 100% of the profit I get from the sale of these products to the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota.
