Today’s post features a short masterwork by Fanny Mendelssohn. For a long time she was mostly famous as Felix Mendelssohn’s sister, and as the composer of a few beautiful songs that were published under her brother’s name—but in recent years, as the full extent of her enormous compositional oeuvre has begun to be realized, she has started to take her place as a major figure.
Certainly as a composer of art songs, she is every bit as interesting as Franz Schubert or Robert Schumann, and her short character pieces like this one suggest that she may have been instrumental in coming up with the idea of the “Song Without Words,” and the idea of writing for the piano in imitation of the voice.