Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel

Fanny and her younger brother Felix had the same teachers and the same gifts, and at thirteen she could play all forty-eight preludes and fugues of the Well-Tempered Clavier from memory. Their father wrote to her that music would be for Felix a profession and for her at most an ornament, and she accepted the arrangement for most of her life. Six of her songs were published under her brother's name; Queen Victoria once told Felix that her favourite of his songs was one of Fanny's, and he had to say so.

She ran an ambitious concert series in the family's garden hall in Berlin, composed steadily, and wrote the piano cycle Das Jahr, one movement for each month, on paper of a different colour for each. In 1846, against her brother's advice and after years of hesitation, she published a collection under her own name. She was rehearsing one of his works the following May when she had a stroke at the piano and died the same evening at forty-one. Felix collapsed on hearing it and died six months later. Most of her manuscripts were not printed for well over a century.