The Easter Sonata of Fanny Mendelssohn (1828)

Fanny Mendelssohn committed her Easter Sonata to paper in 1828, thereafter mentioning it only briefly in her diary and letters in 1829. Whether the manuscript survived, and if so where it was, remained a mystery until the 1970s when the work was performed in Paris, France. In 2010, the manuscript was rediscovered and positively identified as a work by Fanny Mendelssohn. This article presents the story of the Easter Sonata using documentary and codicological evidence, provides musical analysis of the work to identify Fanny Mendelssohn’s compositional voice, and places the Easter Sonata in context of the Mendelssohn family’s social constructs

Archaeology · Art · Art history · Context (archaeology) · Literature · Piano · Piano sonata · History · Musicology and Musical Analysis