Easter Sonata 1828
A Mystery, Solved
The Easter Sonata has one of the more remarkable origin stories in the catalog; it took nearly two centuries and the contributions of many researchers for this elusive sonata to be rediscovered and correctly attributed to its composer, Fanny Hensel.
The sonata left only three traces in letters and diaries from Hensel's lifetime:
First, on April 13, 1829, a few days after her brother Felix departed for a long tour of England and Scotland, Hensel wrote in her diary about the morning he left: “I remained upstairs with Felix as long as I could, and helped him with his dress and last minute packing. It was cold. We watched them as they went down the street to the east until we could see them no longer.” Then she writes about going to a baptism, eating lunch, some friends coming to visit, and then: “I played my Easter Sonata.”
A few months later, Karl Klingemann, a family friend traveling with Felix, wrote back to Berlin to report that he and Felix “found on board the New York steamer ‘Napoleon’… a Broadwood piano… at which—in the Liverpool harbor… Felix sat down and played to me… the first movement of your Easter Sonata.”
Lastly, about a week later, Hensel wrote back: “Dear Felix, that you played from my Easter Sonata on a Broadwood in the Atlantic would be boundlessly ludicrous, if it weren’t so very nice. I've been amusing myself with it for weeks.”
Those three mentions—one diary entry, one letter from Klingemann, one letter from Hensel—were the only known references to the work for over a century.
Around 150 years later, researchers began putting together clues about the sonata. In 1975, Mendelssohn scholar Rudolph Elvers referenced a work that may have been the sonata. In 1992, Hensel biographer Françoise Tillard wrote that the sonata was privately owned and the owner would not let anyone see it. In 1999, musicologist Renate Hellwig-Unruh compiled the first complete catalog of Hensel's works and noted that pages were missing from one of her composition notebooks. A previous archivist had recorded that a sonata had once occupied those pages.
Then in 2010, scholar R. Larry Todd published his biography Fanny Hensel: The Other Mendelssohn and introduced a new piece of the puzzle: a “world premiere” recording from the 1970s of an Easter Sonata attributed to Felix Mendelssohn. There was no evidence that Felix had ever written an Easter Sonata. Todd's book suggested that someone should investigate. His graduate student Angela Mace took up the challenge.
Mace conducted extensive archival research and traveled to Berlin to examine the notebook with the missing pages. She eventually tracked down Eric Heidsieck, the pianist who had recorded the sonata in 1972, and arranged to meet him, along with the manuscript's owner and the record label owner, in Paris to examine the manuscript directly. She was not permitted to photograph it, but she confirmed that it was written in Fanny Hensel's hand and that its page numbers matched the gap in the Berlin notebook. The attribution question was settled.
Working from a handwritten copy of the sonata, Mace prepared an edition and made it available for free online in 2013. In her words: “Even though making this edition was a lot of work, the best outcome for Fanny's sonata is that it finally gets played, performed, enjoyed and appreciated by pianists and audiences around the world.”
Angela Mace’s decision to make her edition freely available online directly inspired me to create HenselPushers, to use open access publishing as a means of bringing Hensel's music to more performers and audiences.
The manuscript later disappeared and resurfaced again; now it is held at the Morgan Library in New York City. Bärenreiter subsequently published an edition based directly on the autograph manuscript, at which point Angela Mace removed her edition from her site, since her edition was based on a handwritten copy and was less accurate than the Bärenreiter edition. (HenselPushers’ Easter Sonata edition is based on photographs of the autograph manuscript.)