On 1 June 1835, Felix Mendelssohn wrote a letter to Madame Marie-Cathérine Kiéné, the mother of his childhood piano teacher, whom his sister was planning to visit in Paris. ‘It will make you happy to get to know my sister again’, he explained, ‘for she is an excellent woman’. He went on:

Thirty years ago, Mendelssohn's claim that his sister's lieder ‘belong to the very best that we possess of song’ might have aroused some scepticism. One might have blithely dismissed the idea, without having listened to enough of her songs to make a valid judgment. Or, at best, one might have set out to prove Mendelssohn right – not, however, by evaluating Hensel's songs on their own terms but by measuring them against her brother's, seeking a kind of legitimization via equivalence (as if to say, ‘her songs are better than you'd think; look how much they sound like his!’). Today, we know that Mendelssohn was right: despite being discouraged from pursuing a career as a professional composer and forced to curtail her creative endeavours so that she could keep a home and raise a family, Hensel nonetheless managed to write almost 250 songs, and in the process developed a compositional voice that was as original and assured as any in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Our view of Hensel's artistic achievement is now more accurate, and more complete, thanks to an outpouring of historical, editorial and analytical research. Scholars have contextualized her life and work, edited and published her diaries and letters, as well as her music (much of which remains buried in archives), and examined the intricacies and wonders of her musical language.Footnote ² But the rediscovery and re-evaluation of Fanny Hensel would not have been possible were it not for the performers who have breathed life into her beautiful music and shared it with a wide audience.

The two CDs by soprano Dorothea Craxton and pianist Babette Dorn are the most recent in a line of recordings of Hensel's lieder stretching back to the early 1990s.Footnote ³ The first, from 2009, covers familiar ground (if such a thing can be said of Hensel's songs), featuring performances of three of her four published song collections: opp. 1, 7 and 10.Footnote ⁴ (The disc also includes several Eichendorff settings.) If you know any Hensel songs, you will likely know some from these collections, and you may even have in your ear the sound of soprano Susan Gritton and pianist Eugene Asti, who released an excellent CD in 2000 containing all four collections in their entirety.

Craxton and Dorn's performance of the six songs of op. 7 bears favourable comparison with Gritton and Asti's. Indeed, their account of Hensel's famous Nachtwanderer, op. 7, no. 1, is one of the best I've heard. The tempo is suitably relaxed – neither too fast nor too slowFootnote ⁵ – which enhances the nocturnal mood; Craxton sounds lovely in her lower register and knows when to hold back her vibrato for expressive purposes. They also take an appropriately nocturnal pace in the penultimate song, the exquisite Bitte.

Unfortunately, their performances of opp. 1 and 10 don't measure up nearly as well, mostly because Craxton's voice lacks the warmth and lustre of Gritton's. Her high notes (above about F) are often strained, and some songs are marred as a result. Gondellied, op. 1, no. 6, is a prime example. The song has a satisfying lilt: Dorn's continuous semiquaver figuration is as fluid as the Venetian waterway it depicts, and Craxton's singing conveys passion but also a measure of sweetness. But already by the end of the first phrase the F♯’s on ‘Mondespracht’ and ‘Gondel’ disturb the sense of calm – the timbre of Craxton's voice doesn't fit the mood she seems to want to create. The climactic high A (‘dann schwebt mit uns’) only makes matters worse; her tone is rather more piercing than floating. Craxton's high A's in Bergeslust, op. 10, no. 5, seem even more incongruous: rather than striking them gently and then blossoming – as would seem appropriate, considering the crescendo hairpin – she attacks them forcibly. In the same song, Dorn negotiates widely spaced tenths in the left hand by rolling them, but she doesn't play the upper notes of these tenths in strict time, and the song therefore stumbles rather than gallops. Other keyboardists have managed to overcome this pianistic challenge, either by placing the upper notes squarely on the beat or by playing them with the right hand.Footnote ⁶

Craxton and Dorn's second CD, from 2013, makes up for many of these shortcomings – not because the performances are markedly better than those on the first disc, but because they bring to light a number of previously unrecorded and unpublished songs. There are no fewer than ten world premiere recordings, three of early songs that only exist in manuscript: Dir zu eröffnen mein Herz (titled Lied aus der Ferne on the CD) (1825), Maigesang (1827) and Suleika: Wie mit innigstem Behagen (1827). These unpublished songs are anything but forgettable juvenilia. The earliest of the three, Dir zu eröffnen mein Herz, is a true gem (and apparently little known, since it is mentioned neither in Larry Todd's The Other Mendelssohn nor in The Lied, Art Song and Choral Texts Archive).Footnote ⁷ Written when Hensel was not yet 20, it bears all the signs of her mature style, only in distilled form. First, there is the careful coordination of tonality and mood: the song is in B-flat major but turns to minor keys (G minor, E-flat minor and C minor) when the poetic persona experiences feelings of pain, bereavement and doubt; remarkably, it is also directionally tonal – it ends in G minor, underscoring the failure expressed in the final couplet (‘Will ich umarmen/Und kann es nicht’).Footnote ⁸ Second, Hensel elongates key words with melismas: ‘traurig’, ‘Geliebten’ and most dramatically ‘blutet’, whose first syllable is set to a chromatic descent from G to B, over equally chromatic harmonies. (The passage prefigures a similarly chromatic and melismatic descent from G to B♭ in bars 28–30 of Im Herbste, op. 10, no. 4, written over two decades later. Play these two tracks one after the other and you'll see that Hensel's late songs, for all their sense of adventure, are not so far removed from some of her early experiments.) Finally, Dir zu eröffnen mein Herz reveals how, to quote Larry Todd, ‘compositional restraint could engender musical and poetic intensification’.Footnote ⁹ These words refer to Seufzer (1827), a spare, haunting lament that echoes the slow movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. But they could just as well apply to Dir zu eröffnen mein Herz, Am leuchtenden Sommermorgen or Was will die einsame Träne – all early songs – or, for that matter, the late song Totenklage, a setting of Justinus Kerner's poem about his brother's death, where the piano's muted chorale poignantly conveys the unspeakable pangs of grief. Songs such as these deserve to be heard, not only because they open a window onto a world of domestic music-making by women in the nineteenth century, but also because they are good – because they open up unique and profound worlds of expression. Dorothea Craxton and Babette Dorn have done a great service in bringing these works to light. One hopes that other performers will follow their lead.