Piano Trio in d minor, Op. 11

Composer: MENDELSSOHN HENSEL, Fanny
  • Hensel composed this trio in early 1847. She played the work’s premiere at her first Sonntagsmusik gathering of the season, on April 11, 1847. (Her friend, German diplomat Robert von Keudell, played the violin, and her brother Paul played the cello.)1
    • Around the time that Hensel was writing this trio, she was spending a lot of time with Clara Schumann, who visited the Hensels almost daily in March of 1847. 
    • Clara Schumann had recently completed her own Piano Trio in g minor, Op. 17, and she may have intended to dedicate it to Hensel – we don’t know for sure because Hensel died before Schumann’s trio was published. 
  • This piano trio is Hensel’s penultimate composition.2
    • A few days after the trio premiered, Hensel wrote in her diary that she feared she was losing her inspiration to compose, as she hadn’t written anything since the trio.  She also expressed fear that she wouldn’t publish any more music (surprising, because she had only begun to publish the year before). In hindsight, she may have realized she was ill; she would die of a series of strokes the next month, on May 14, 1847. 
    • As it turned out, Hensel did complete one more composition before her death: a joyful little song for voice and piano entitled Bergeslust. The Eichendorff poem she set to music ends with the line “Our fantasies as well as our songs rise up to heaven.” Her family had this poignantly appropriate line inscribed on Hensel’s tombstone. 
  • This trio was published posthumously in 1850 by Breitkopf und Härtel in Leipzig, as Hensel’s Op. 11. A public performance of the work was mentioned in the Feb. 11, 1852 edition of the Neue Berlin Musikzeitung.3

Sources

  1. Angela Mace Christian, “Hensel [née Mendelssohn (-Bartholdy)], Fanny Cäcilie,” Grove Music Online (November 28, 2018), accessed June 3, 2021, https://ww.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-3000000159.  
  2. Ibid.
  3. “Piano Trio, Op. 11 (Hensel, Fanny),” IMSLP, accessed July 29, 2021, https://imslp.org/wiki/Piano_Trio%2C_Op.11_(Hensel%2C_Fanny). 

Cut IDs

22098 23670