Early Sonata Work 1822-1824
Expanding scope
This collection includes Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel’s earliest surviving piano sonata work. All we know of her earliest piano sonata (H43) was that it was in F Major and that she likely wrote it in fall of 1821 at age 15; unfortunately the sonata itself has been lost. The three works in this collection were written during Fanny’s remaining teenage years, and in them she explores and experiments with the piano sonata genre—a larger scale of work than what she had written before, arguably encroaching on her brother Felix’s territory. On her manuscript for H44, an Allegro assai moderato in E major, she labeled the work “the beginning of a sonata,” and through her characteristic lyricism delivers an interesting variation on sonata form. In H113, written two years later, Fanny’s love for the piano works of Beethoven is apparent. In summer of 1824, Fanny completed her second full (three-movement) piano sonata: H128 in C minor, our first surviving example of her work in the genre.
Hensel began piano sonatas three more times over her career, and completed two of them. With the publication of this collection, all of Hensel’s completed, surviving piano sonatas are now available for free online. In 1828, she wrote her Easter Sonata (H235)—lost for 150 years then misattributed to Felix, and only rightfully attributed to Fanny in 2012 thanks to researcher Angela Mace Christian. In 1829, Hensel started a fourth piano sonata (H246) in E-flat major which she never finished, but years later repurposed into her excellent string quartet (H277) of 1834. Hensel wrote her last sonata—and one of the greatest of her hundreds of works—in 1843: Piano Sonata in G Minor (H395).
Update - July 2023: This collection has been transcribed into braille by brailleorch.org! Braille scores are linked on the pages for each piece below: