Fanny Hensel: ‘Singing with your fingers’

The granddaughter of the great Enlightenment thinker Moses Mendelssohn had to ‘compose her way’ through her short life, in the face of her family’s opposition and bourgeois etiquette: ‘Incidentally, the fact that one’s wretched feminine nature is thrust upon one every day, at every step of one’s life, by the lords of creation, is a matter that could drive one to fury – and thus rob one of one’s womanhood – were it not for the fact that this would only make the evil worse.’

Judith Kessler talks about Fanny, her life and the events in Berlin society of her time. Arno Waschk plays piano pieces by the composer and her contemporaries.