Two Pieces for cello and piano (c.1829)

Fantasia in G minor

Capriccio in A flat major

Felix Mendelssohn did not underestimate the quality of his elder sister’s music. “I heartily rejoice in her compositions,” he told their mother in 1837, “and think them charming and admirable.” He was not, on the other hand in favour of her publishing them: “For this purpose a succession of works is indispensable, one after the other…and from my knowledge of Fanny I would say she has neither the inclination nor the vocation for authorship. She runs her household and does not think of the public or of the musical world, or even of music at all, until her first duties are fulfilled. Publishing would only disturb her in these, and I cannot say that I approve of it.”

Although a few of Fanny Mendelssohn’s works were actually published in her lifetime, beginning with six songs printed under Felix’s name when she was in her mid-twenties, they represent only a small proportion of the four hundred or so scores she actually completed. After her marriage to Wilhelm Hensel in 1829 she was hostess of the musical matinees regularly presented at the Mendelssohn-Bartholdy home in Berlin and it was for these occasions that she composed much of her music. It was a matter not just of songs for her younger sister Rebecca, cello pieces for her brother Paul and Songs without Words for herself but many more ambitious chamber and vocal works too.

To judge by the Fantasia in G minor that Fanny dedicated to Paul in about 1829 - a couple of years before he moved to London to take up the family profession of banking - the younger of the two Mendelssohn brothers was a highly accomplished cellist and imaginative musician even at the age of sixteen. At the beginning of the opening Andante doloroso the cello does no more than support the bass line of the intimately expressive piano part but, as it takes up the melodic interest for the first time, it finds itself poised on a line two or three octaves higher. In the Prestissimo that follows a modulation to G major the cello is confined mainly to the its more forceful lower strings. It then returns to its most eloquent register for the slower section that leads directly, though not without some harmonic suspense, into the Allegro molto moderato closing section of a refreshingly eccentric construction.

Although it bears no dedication, the Capriccio in A flat was probably also intended for Paul Mendelssohn. Written a little later than the Fantasia in G minor, it is a symmetrical ternary structure enclosing a dramatic Allegro molto in F minor - which itself has a contrasting middle section - between Andante outer sections in a lilting 12/8 time.

The Fantasia in G minor and the Capriccio in A flat were first published (in an edition by Chirstian Lambour) in 1994.