Fanny Hensel’s String Quartet (1834): Interventions and Correspondences - Benedict Taylor (University of Edinburgh)

The music of Fanny Hensel is currently enjoying a strong revival, both in terms of public performance and in scholarly inquiry.  Alongside this surge of interest has come a growing awareness of the problems, challenges, and obstacles faced not only by Hensel but by her music.  And these challenges are not just historical (as might easily be expected), but in many cases present even today among those who are ostensibly involved with championing her music.  In this talk I examine one of her most ambitious and individual compositions, the String Quartet of 1834, focusing on a selection of passages which highlight issues that may be profitably used as case-studies in Henselian reception from her own time to the present day.  These include basic factual disagreements (such as conflicting interpretations of the autograph score – including some impressive editorial malpractice), problems of analytical interpretation arising from Hensel’s startling formal idiosyncrasies, and expressive questions of private meanings composed into the allusive fabric of her work (taking up Cornelia Bartsch’s idea of ‘music as correspondence’).  I argue that Hensel’s current renaissance is an illustration of the dangers of a style of musical discourse that easily divests itself from an evidentiary basis, but also affords a welcome opportunity for setting matters to rights – or at least on a better basis.

Benedict Taylor is Reader at the Reid School of Music, University of Edinburgh, where his teaching and research focuses on the music of the late eighteenth to twentieth centuries, theory and analysis, and philosophy. His publications include Mendelssohn, Time and Memory: The Romantic Conception of Cyclic Form (Cambridge, 2011), The Melody of Time: Music and Temporality in the Romantic Era (Oxford, 2016), Music, Subjectivity, and Schumann (Cambridge, 2022), and, as editor, The Cambridge Companion to Music and Romanticism(2021).  He is the recipient of the Royal Musical Association’s Jerome Roche Prize and has held fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study Berlin and Alexander von Humboldt and Andrew W. Mellon Foundations; he also serves as co-editor of Music & Letters and general editor of Cambridge University Press’s Music in Context series (and would be be happy to hear more from anyone interested in publishing their research in either!...).