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Singing Outside Heaven
Janice Galloway writes: The Chamber Group of Scotland asked for a text that would thread together the lives of four female composers for a concert featuring some of their work. I thought that for me to gloss the composers' lives was less interesting than what the composers themselves had to say about how they approached things. Since Janet Beat is the only one of the four who is not yet a dead compose, I gleaned her words from direct interview rather than from other sources: the rest comes from archived letters, diaries, biographies. With this in place, it made sense to add some quotations from contemporary philosophers, authors, painters, anthropologists and historians to add some hint of the composers' time and the general cultural assumptions that surrounded (and surround) composers - all artistic creators - who are female. The text in heavy type is mine: the rest is compilation and patchwork. Domestic skills have their uses.This collaboration was first staged at MAYFEST 1995 at the Cottier Theatre. The text was read by Morag Hood and pieces - Clara Wieck Schumann's Trio in G minor, Janet Beat's Five Projects for Joan, Lili Boulager's Nocturne and Cortege, and Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel's Trio in D minor - performed by the Chamber Group of Scotland.

Singing Outside Heaven

"Why do they shut me out of Heaven?
Do I sing too loud?"

This is Poetry. The poet who wrote those lines was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, 1830. The same year, Fanny Hensel was 25, Clara Schumann 11. The year before, Felix Mendelssohn conducted Bach's newly-rediscovered St Matthew Passion in Berlin: the year after, Charles Darwin sailed to South America on the Beagle to begin his study of human evolution (later published as The Descent of Man) and Arthur Schopenhauer began a study of feeble reasoning power (later published as On Women).

The poet did not read either of those books. The poet merely lived, read, worked and died in one place, one hundred miles west of Boston, devoted to both parents until their deaths. The poet was the contemporary of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Longfellow, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville and Mark Twain but preferred to read Helen Hunt Jackson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lydia Maria Child, Rebecca Harding Davis, Francesca Alexander and everything Elizabeth Barratt Browning, George Elliott and the Brontës ever wrote. The poet wrote a total of 1775 poems of which only seven were published, the rest waiting till after their author's death in 1886. It wasn't that the poet did not desire publication, but the one critic approached on the subject advised against the idea on the grounds the work was too odd, too emotional, too candid. How could he put it? Too female.

The poet did not seek publication again but neither did she change her writing style or what she had to say. The poet, Emily Dickinson, continued to work alone, unheard and largely unencouraged during her lifetime. She is now widely acknowledged as one of the greatest of all American poets - by some one of the greatest who ever wrote in English.

1864
Why do they shut me out of Heaven? Do I sing - too loud?

1836
It is a pleasure to me to find a public asking for my pieces in London, for here I have none at all. Once a year, perhaps, someone will copy a piece of mine or ask me to play something special - certainly not oftener and my songs lie unheeded and unknown...

1918
One can't help but think had she been a man, such works as Faust and Helen would have entered the standard repertory by now.

1995
Where I grew up there were very few children, just me and a some little boys and little boys often aren't keen to play with little girls. So I got used quite early on to living in my own world and being self-sufficient which is just as well.

1839
I once believed I had creative talent but I have given up this idea; a woman must not wish to compose - there never was one able to do it. Am I intended to be the one? It would be arrogant to believe that. That was something with which my father tempted me in earlier days but I soon became discouraged from believing it. May Robert always create: that must always make me happy.

Music: Trio in G minor; Clara Wieck Schumann

There is a 19th Century Critical fallacy, one we've all heard, that Art is not Life. Art is Truth, Beauty, an Eternal Flame. But it is not Life. Life is what ordinary people have. Artists are not ordinary people and neither are the people who know best how to judge Art. They are the Critical Establishment. They, Art and Artists exist in Higher Realms ie beyond the petty restrictions that shape the lives of the rest of us. The Critical Establishment, therefore, is Objective. It transcends the social and political follies of its age. The Critical Establishment, like Art, History, Philosophy and Nature, is classless, colourless, sexless.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosopher, 1821:
Women are certainly capable of learning but they are not made for the higher forms of science, such as philosophy and certain types of artistic creativity; these require a universal ingredient. Women may hit on good ideas and they may, of course, have taste and elegance, but they lack a talent for the ideal.

Friedrich Nietzsche, philosopher, 1871:
Man...must create artificially, through the medium of technology and symbols. In so doing, he creates relatively long-lasting, eternal, transcendent objects, while woman creates only perishables - human beings. When a woman becomes a scholar, it is usually a sign there is something wrong with her sexual organs.

New York Evening Post critic, 1908:
This concert affirmed my conviction that while women may some day vote, they will never learn to compose anything worthwhile. All of them seem superficial when they write music.

Thomas Beecham, conductor, 1961:
There are no women composers, never have been and possibly never will be.

Jane Austen, writer, 1818:
A woman, especially if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as best she can.

Let's state the obvious. Telling women not to create is a long-standing tradition. We can't do it. We shouldn't do it. We'll break our family's hearts if we do it. We'll be unlovable and unhappy if we do it. We won't even be proper women.

Abraham Mendelssohn to his fifteen year-old daughter, Fanny, 1820:
Music will perhaps become [your brother's] profession whilst for you it must be only an ornament, never the root of your being and doing. It does you credit you have always shown yourself good and sensible in these matters, and your joy at the praise he earns proves you might, in his place, have merited approval. Remain true to these sentiments... they are truly feminine and only what is truly feminine is an ornament to your sex.

Alma Schindler, on her fiance, Gustav Mahler, 1902:
Gustav considered the marriage of Robert and Clara Schumann 'ridiculous' [and] sent me a long letter with the demand I give up music and live for his alone.

Elizabeth Mann Borghese, writer, 1934:
At the age of eighteen, my father, [Thomas Mann] sent me to a psychiatrist to help me recover from an unhappy love affair. In the course of therapy, I told the psychiatrist I had a desire to become a great musician."Women do not become great musicians" the psychiatrist told me: "You must choose between art and fulfillment, between music and family life." But why? Why must I choose? No-one said to Toscanini or Bach or my father that they must choose between their art and their personal, family life, between it and fulfillment as a man. Injustice everywhere.

Catherine Drinker Bowen, writer, 1934:
We don't want her to take music too seriously.We don't want her to become too intense over something and warped and queer. Such women don't... make good wives.

Waverley Root, polemicist, 1949:
In those rare individual cases where a woman approaches genius, she also approaches masculinity.

Priscilla McLean, composer, 1982:
I was brought up to believe that all composers were men, and that women, to work at all, should take a temporary job like nursing or teaching until they inevitably got married and had children. Then they were to quit and take care of the home. Even hiring a babysitter so I could compose seemed unnatural, even immoral.

Second obvious statement: belittlement, prohibition and emotional blackmail are not the best bases for an Artist to work from. Art is not easily produced even under good social conditions. It is not easy for anyone. The creation of Art demands time, patience, continuity, even selfishness. It demands fortitude in the face of self-doubt. Most people who create know that.

Constant toil is the law of Art...Honore de Balzac, writer, 1849

Third obvious statement: time, silence, self-confidence and an aptitude for selfishness are even more difficult demands for some than for others.

Clara Schumann, 34th week of marriage, 1841.
Robert is feeling better again and, as I write this, is merry as a lark...For 3 days he has been orchestrating his second orchestral work...and already has new ideas for a third. The more diligently my Robert pursues his art, however, the less I accomplish. Heaven knows, there are always hindrances, and, small as our household is, there is always this and that which robs me of time. I've begun playing scales and exercises again for an hour so at least I won't unlearn everything but when it comes to composing, there's really nothing left any more. All poetry has abandoned me.

Anaïs Nin, writer, 1940
The aggressive act of creation, the guilt for creating. I do not want to rival man, to steal his thunder. I must protect him, not outshine him.

Sylvia Plath, poet, 1961
Perfection is terrible. It cannot have children.

Marga Richter, composer, 1980
I didn't have commission coming in and deadlines to meet while the kids were growing up. To tell them go away, I'm busy - I don't think I could have done this.

Joseph Conrad, writer, 1900
For twenty months, I wrestled with the Lord for my creation...mind and will and conscience engaged to the full day after day...I suppose I must have eaten the food put in front of me, taken drink, but I was never aware of the even flow of daily life, made easy and noiseless for me by a silent, watchful,tireless affection.

Helen Stimpson, writer and critic, 1981
The biggest drawback about being woman writer is not having a wife.

Gloria Steinem, essayist, 1984
I have yet to hear a man ask for guidance on how to combine marriage and a career.

Let's restate the obvious again.
The lives of men and women are different. The conditions under which they produce art are logistically, emotionally, historically different. The 19th Century Critical fallacy 's worst fault is that it ignores the obvious.

Art is Life. Art is made of the stuff of life and by people living real lives. Different lives prioritise differently, they see different things. That there is only one way of seeing and that one way is the Right Way is a terrible untruth. A critical approach that denies the worth or even the existence of thing s to which it is blind, reduces for all of us what Art might be.

Now this wouldn't be a problem if the 19th Century fallacy died with the 19th Century. But it has left a remarkably pervasive legacy.

I can get no pleasure from serious writing that lacks a strong male thrust. (Antony Burgess, writer 1975)

Miss Chaminade's is a work that is strong and virile, too virile perhaps, and that is the reproach I would be tempted to address to it. (New York Evening Post critic, 1908)

All Mrs Shelley did was to provide a passive reflection of some of the wild fantasies which were living in the air around her. (Mario Praz, critic, on the author of Frankenstein, 1951)

She was a private poet who wrote indefatigably as some women cook or knit. Her gift for words and the cultural predicament of her time drove her to poetry instead of antimacassars.(R P Blackmur, critic, on Emily Dickinson,1937)

[Publishing] necessitates a series of works, one after the other. Fanny, as I know her, possesses neither the calling nor the inclination for publication... (Felix Mendelssohn, composer, 1836)

Salon music, lullabies, small chamber pieces may possess great charm but the difficulty in according serious consideration to so many women composers is that they have attempted nothing large scale, nothing to show the mastery (sic) of great forces which are the universally acknowledged test of serious talent. (Franz Kerner, critic, 1980)

One tale was told that my works were not done by myself; M Menageot painted my pictures and even my portraits. Although so many people could naturally bear witness to the contrary, this absurd report did not cease till I had been received at the Royal Academy of Painting. (Elizabeth Vigee-Lebrun, artist, 1788)

It's not Mlle Lili Boulanger's [work is] ... never marred by the pettiness or affectations that would quickly have revealed the work of a woman. (Paul Martineau, critic for Le Monde Musical, 1909)

And if all else fails, ignore the work, the workers and the whole tradition - the most often deployed tactic and the hardest to combat. (Joanna Russ, critic, 1985)

Here, I remind you, we are talking of the women who come to create at all, who make it to print, onto manuscript, onto canvas. There were many more for whom opportunities never arose, whose careers went unnoticed.

It is hard to find the time, the energy, the courage to take issue with judgments the judgments of those we have been taught are the Great Thinkers of the Past, to wonder if their vision may be partial. But partial, in more ways than one, is what it often is. And most women who create know that.

Lady Mary Wortley Montague, letterist, 1753:
If there were a commonwealth of rational horses (as Dr Swift has supposed) it would be an established maxim among them that a mare could not be taught to pace.

Charlotte Brontë, writer, 1847:
You will, I know, keep measuring me by some standard you deem becoming to my sex.

Ethel Smyth, composer, 1928:
This temptation to pretend that women are non-existent musically, to ignore or damp down our little triumphs...is a microbe that will flourish comfortably, though perhaps surreptitiously, in the male organism till there are enough women composers for it to die a natural death. Whereupon men will forget it ever existed. Have they not already forgotten their frenzied opposition to votes for women?

Dale Spender, critic, 1982
We can [and do] produce art, we have been doing so for centuries, but it...is not visible in our culture because we are not the judges of what is significant. We are simply women producing work that is different to that produced by men in a society where what men do is what counts.

It is important to notice. Even though it's so ... well ... unwomanly to do so.
Flatter, deceive, use all the wiles of your sex. Above all, amuse. But never, ever, complain.

There are whole fields, whole territories of artistic creativity patiently waiting to be reread, reheard, reappraised. The work of women who took the risk anyway. Who did - who do - sing.

Music: Janet Beat: Five Projects for Joan

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Interval

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Music: Lili Boulager, Nocturnes; Cortège

These are Short Stories. Make the connections between them yourself.

Story Number One. Lili Boulanger was born in Paris in 1893. Her mother, Marie-Julie Hallinger, had been a singer with the Opera Comique while her father, Ernest won the Prix de Rome prize for composition in 1838. They were moneyed, intellectual, open-minded towards different cultures and religions besides their own Catholic faith. The possibilities these things suggest were Lili's from birth.

Two key events that determined her future as a composer happened early. The first, at the age of two, was an attack of bronchial pneumonia so severe it wiped out most of her immune system: the second, at the age of six, was the unexpected death of her father. Lili had been his favourite. The only thing the child could do with her grief was decide to become a composer, to win the same prize he had won. Love of family, specifically love of her father, instead of being a repressive force thus became the very thing from which she could draw strength to work. At the same time, Lili's infantile illness led Mme Boulanger to keep her daughter under a wing of extreme protectiveness and seclusion that would stay in place throughout her short life. Isolation, nurturance, a clear goal, no possibility of marriage or children. In this composer's story, these things are not unconnected.

Despite recurring illness, she entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1912 and in 1913, was indeed the first woman to win the prize her father had won 75 years earlier.

The papers went to town.

Emile Vuillermoz, critic, 1913:
Mlle Lili Boulanger has just triumphed in the last Prix de Rome competition over all its male contestants and has carried off the First Grand Prize with authority. Do not be fooled: this deed stands on its own merits. Not only did the gallantry of the judges not intervene to facilitate her victory but they were stricter with this young girl of nineteen than with her competitors. It required all the crushing weight of indisputable superiority of this woman's work to triumph over the student's homework that surrounded it. Truly it is a sad time for the sex that considers itself strong. If the China dolls of music decide to vie with him for official laurels, he is lost before he starts.

Paul Martineau, critic for Le Monde Musical 1913:
Mlle Lili Boulanger already shows a happy penchant for limpid melodies, an astonishing sense of theatre, an admirable sense of ease in expressing passionate sentiments and a healthy continuity of line, never marred by the pettiness or affectations that would quickly have revealed the work of a woman.

Bill Zakariasen, music critic, 1918:
Lili Boulanger's cantata is simply gorgeous, full of intoxicating melody and shimmering late-romantic orchestration. One can't help but think had she been a man, such works as Faust and Helen would have entered the standard repertory by now.

Lili Boulanger died in 1819 at the age of 26 with her opera, interrupted for the French war effort, unfinished. A sizable proportion of her music has been lost, her letters are unobtainable. The contemporary tributes to her work did not bring her to greater notice. These days it is more usual to find conclusions suggesting that Lili Boulanger's extraordinary capabilities are simply embellishments after the fact.

Grace Reuben-Rabsen, psychologist, 1973:
Boulanger's talent is undeniable, but composition with text, as many of hers are, demonstrate verbal ability (a typically feminine gift) rather than true compositional ability.

Lili Boulanger is more isolated now than she was during her lifetime.

Story Number Two. Janet Beat was born in 1937 in Streetly, Staffordshire and isn't dead yet. Even as a small child, she knew she wanted to study and write music. Her father, who ran an engineering business, was less enthusiastic.

I had big problems with my mother and father, their having rows about my wanting to compose. They thought creativity was a kind of madness and madness and divorce were two things nice families didn't have anything to do with.

Not being allowed to study music till later school years did, however, bring an unexpected bonus:

I only sat my university entrance requirements late. That meant my tastes were not formed by teachers. I liked contemporary stuff and non-European work and was left alone long enough to think this was normal. I thought writing music was a natural thing too because I hadn't been exposed to enough people telling me otherwise. At university, of course, I was set right and told I admired the wrong composers. In the final year, you had to submit a portfolio of compositions or essays and I insisted on compositions. The head of music said, "In that case, you better write programme music, much better for you as a woman." He seemed to think I'd find what he assumed to be the surerior demands of abstract composition beyond me. So of course, I wrote an Overture.

Other difficulties have been less easy to turn to advantage:

I've never been fashionable. People have been telling me I'm either ahead of musical trends or behind them for as long as I can remember but there's no point worrying about that. What's more difficult to deal with is isolation. I suppose it keeps you from beocmeing institutionalised, but it's still hard. There has been a lot of negativity, one way or another. I try to turn some of it into fuel for my music but sometimes I just get worn out by it, to be honest.

Childhood, however, still sustains:

The place I grew up there were very few children, just me and a small group of little boys and little boys often don't like to play with little girls. So I got used quite early on to living in my own world and being self-sufficient which is just as well, really.

Janet Beat is a pioneer of electronic music composition in Britain who has worked in Scotland for over 22 years. She is not listed or indexed among the other contemporary composers listed in John Purser's wide-ranging overview, Scotland's Music.

Story Number Three. Clara Josephine Wieck was born in 1819 in Leipzig. Her mother, Marianne Tromlitz was a singer and pianist, her father, Frederick Wieck, the owner of a music business who also taught piano and singing. Their divorce in 1824 left Clara, at the age of 5, in the automatic custody of a man who saw bullying as a reasonable teaching technique: she escaped the beatings regularly doled out to her half-brothers on account of her superior playing. She performed in the Gewandhaus at 9 and by the age of 18 was taking Europe by storm. All her letters home from tour were dictated by her father: My poor father has been hoping I will be a better child but finds I am just as lazy, careless, disorderly, stubborn, disobedient etc as ever.

Robert Schumann, a pupil of her father's, had been known to Clara since childhood. His attentions towards her took on a new note in 1835. In 1840, after a lengthy legal battle with her father who opposed her decision bitterly, the already famous Clara Wieck married the relatively unknown young composer. Their joint marriage diaries are a moving record of the creative partnership. For all Robert's support of his wife's talent, however, it shows familiar patterns.

Robert 11th week of marriage, 1840:
A quiet week which went by with composing and much loving and kissing. My wife is love, kindness and unpretentiousness itself...A small cycle of Kerner poems is ready; they gave dear Clara pleasure as well as pain; since she must purchase my love so often with silence and invisibility. Well, that's the way it goes in marriages of artists and if they love each other, that's always good enough.

Clara, 38th week of marriage, 1841:
My piano playing is falling behind. This always happens when Robert is composing. There is not even one hour in the whole day for myself. If only I don't fall too far behind. My score reading has ceased too though I hope it won't be for long this time. I can't do anything with my composing - it makes me want to strike my own stupid head.

Robert, 1843
Clara has written a number of small pieces which show a musical and tender invention that she has never attained before. But to have children and a husband who is always living in the realms of the imagination do not go together with composing. She cannot work regularly and I am often disturbed to think how many profound ideas are lost because she cannot work them out. But Clara herself knows her main occupation is as a mother and I believe she is happy in the circumstances and would not want them changed.

Clara, 1847, on learning of her fifth pregnancy:
What will become of my work? Robert says children are blessings and he is right because without children there is indeed no happiness, and so I have decided to face the difficult time to come as cheerfully as possible. Whether it will always be like this, I don't know.

After a year of two concert tours, the Schumann festival in Zwickau, two years of nursing Robert through worsening depression, the death of her youngest child and the start of yet another pregnancy, she wrote: I am lazy because I am always terribly weak. Clara Schumann bore eight children in the space of twelve years whilst continuing to compose, play and give premieres of her husband's works.

In 1854, after a suicide attempt brought about by his deteriorating depressive state, Robert was hospitalised in Bonn-Endenich and died there two years later. Refusing offers of charity, Clara concertised, edited, taught and arranged music to keep her family and her own artistic need alive. Her last public concert, at the age of 72, and died in Frankfurt six years later, listening to her son Ferdinand playing Robert Schumann's Intermezzi Op 4.

She never experienced dissuasion from publication. With Clara Schumann, the difficulties of authorship and the confidence for authorship came from subtler things. They still do. History records her reductively. A proud woman who raged at the directors of The Düsseldorf Municipal Concert Society for giving her flowers instead of a fee after one sell-out concert; a woman of strong views who, despite the adulation of the times, dismissed Wagner (Rheingold made me feel as if I were wading in a swamp the whole evening) and Liszt (He is always very clever though tasteless at times, as for his compositions, I can only call them horrible); editor and champion of the works of Robert Schumann; the closest friend Johannes Brahms ever had; Europe's most respected virtuosa, recognised as the peer of Liszt, Mendelssohn, Thalberg and Rubinstein in a concert career that lasted over 60 years; an inspirational composer and teacher. She was also a composer and took great joy in that fact. Nothing, she wrote after finishing the 6 songs of her Op 23, nothing surpasses creative activity, even if only for those hours of self-forgetfulness when one breathes solely in the world of sound.

For all that, she is still most often visible - when she is visible at all in conventional music textbooks published outside Germany - as the wife of a now famous husband: still most often quoted - if she is quoted at all - as calling her Trio, Op 7, "woman's work, which lacks force and occasionally, invention."

When Brahms writes: By rights, I should have to inscribe all my best melodies "really by Clara Schumann". I have you to thank for more melodies than all the passages of such things you take from me, we assume he is merely being charming, indulging in some modest social politesse. When it comes to Clara's remark, we assume she is merely being accurate.

Fanny Mendelssohn Bartholdy never needed to work for her living. The daughter of one of the wealthiest bankers in Europe, her social position made the possibility of a concert career unthinkable. The eldest child of Abraham Mendelssohn and Leah Salomon, Fanny was born in 1805 into a family who took closeness between its members for granted. Even so, her bond with her brother, Felix, was unusually intense. Both were precocious, composing from an early age. They shared the same teachers and collaborated on musical projects. At the age of 17, Fanny could still say:
Up to the present moment, I possess his unbounded confidence. I have watched the progress of his talent step by step and may say I have contributed to its development. I have always been his only musical adviser and he never writes down a thought before submitting it to my judgment.

Two years earlier, however, her father had given her a warning:
What you wrote to me about your musical occupations with reference to and in comparison with Felix was both rightly thought and rightly expressed. Music will perhaps become his profession whilst for you it must be only an ornament, never the root of your being and doing.

He repeated it in 1828.
You must prepare more earnestly and eagerly for your real calling, the only calling for a young woman - I mean the state of being a housewife.

The lives of brother and sister were about to seriously diverge. Felix went out into the world to compose: Fanny married the Prussian court painter William Hensel. One year later, in 1830, her first and only child was born. Throughout the 1830's she led a flourishing salon, composing for whatever forces that gathering made available to her. It was only creative channel available to her. Through a lively, affectionate correspondence to Felix, touring as a wild success in various parts of Europe, she tried to retain the old closeness.

1834:
Thank you for the package with St Paul. I don't like the change in the first melody at all; why did you make it? Was it to avoid all the top a's? The melody was lovely but I don't agree with the other changes either...Bring the old version when you come and we'll argue about it.

Passing years, however, noticeably change her tone:

1836 to Felix:
I don't know exactly what Goethe means by the demonic influence...but this much is clear: if it does exist, you exert it over me. I believe that if you seriously suggested I become a good mathematician, I wouldn't have any difficulty in doing so and I could just as easily cease being a musician tomorrow if you thought I wasn't good at it any longer.

1836 to Karl Klingemann, after an approach from a publisher:
I enclose two pianoforte pieces which I have written since I came home from Düsseldorf. I leave it to you to say whether they are worth presenting. But I must add that it is a pleasure to me to find a public for my little pieces, for here I have none at all. Once a year, perhaps, someone will copy a piece of mine or ask me to play something special - and since [my sister] has given up singing, my songs lie unheeded and unknown. If nobody ever offers an opinion or takes the slightest interest in one's productions, one loses in time not only all pleasure in them but all power of judging their value. Felix...is so seldom here and I am thrown back entirely on myself. But my own delight in music and Hensel's sympathy keep me awake, and I cannot help considering it a sign of talent I do not give it up though I can get nobody to take an interest in my efforts.

1837 to her brother's new wife, Cecile:
When shall we see his new concerto? It makes me sad to recall the time when I used to know his music from it birth. It is different now. How strange he should have had a wife these eight months I have never seen.

1837:
Dear Felix, I have not composed a single note this winter...I scarcely remember what it feels like to write a song. But what does it signify? I am not a hen to cackle over my own eggs and not a soul dances to my piping.

With their father's death, however, Felix seemed to take on the paternal role:
I hope I don't need to say that if she decides to publish anything, I will help her all I can and alleviate any difficulties arising from it. But I cannot persuade her to publish because it is against my views and convictions. Fanny, as I know her, possesses neither the inclination nor the calling for authorship. She is too much a woman for that, as is proper, and looks after her house...Publishing would only disturb her in these duties and I cannot reconcile myself to it. To encourage her towards something I don't believe to be right, I cannot do.

Though he was never directly obstructive, Felix steadfastly refused the approval she needed, leaving her to construct the prohibition, out of fear she lost his love, for herself. In the 1840's, however, the friendship of Robert von Keudell, a visitor to the salon, offered her so much support, she found the courage, in 1846, to write:
Dear Felix, I don't expect you to read this rubbish now, busy as you are, but I ought to tell you something. Laugh at me or not as you wish. In a word, I'm beginning to publish. I hope I won't disgrace all of you...and I know you won't really mind. As you can see, I've proceeded completely on my own to spare you any unpleasant moments...and if it all goes to the bad I can have no-one to blame but myself . Please don't think too badly of me.

The songs were a huge success and she began work immediately on the Trio. It was performed on April 11th for her sister, Rebecka's birthday. It was her penultimate work. Just over one year later, on 14th May 1847, Fanny Hensel suffered a fatal stroke and died at the age of 42.

Sebastian Hensel, her son, in a book about his family written in 1884, wrote more on the subject that he perhaps knew:
William Hensel took a sketch of the deceased, one of his best likenesses and the hardest task he ever fulfilled. To him it was the loss of everything, for his whole family life was destroyed...All business matters, the whole management of the house, the superintendence of the property, the education of their son, had been in her care, for in all these things her husband was perfectly inexperienced, living as he did wholly for his art.

Fanny Hensel wrote over 400 works, most of which are still not available in print. She is buried in the Church of the Holy Trinity in Berlin, next to her bother who died only six months after she did. Tourists visiting the grave often leave flowers - usually for Felix.