Dartmouth Films will release Sheila Hayman’s feature film Fanny: The Other Mendelssohn on 27 October throughout the UK
A new feature documentary about Fanny Mendelssohn is to be screened in UK cinemas from 27 October 2023. Dartmouth Films’ Fanny: The Other Mendelssohn from BAFTA-winning director Sheila Hayman and producer Mercury Studios will be shown in more than 100 locations throughout the UK.
The film reveals ‘the extraordinary story of Fanny, a composer long ignored by the classical music world in favour of her famous brother Felix, who despite being forbidden a musical career persevered, composing 450 works in her short life’.
The film also features pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason who performs Fanny’s Easter Sonata – a work that was lost for 150 years and when found attributed to Felix, before finally being recognised as hers. During the documentary Kanneh-Mason explores ‘the parallels between her life and Fanny’s – including the challenge of being a pioneer with few role models in classical music’.
Sheila Hayman, Fanny Mendelssohn’s three times great-granddaughter, writes and directs the film, shot with an all-female crew in Berlin, New York, London, Oxford and Buckingham Palace and featuring many of Fanny’s never-before-heard or recorded pieces.
Hayman writes: Some years ago, I made a film for the BBC called ‘Mendelssohn, The Nazis and Me’, about Felix Mendelssohn (my four times great uncle), his mixed Jewish/Christian identity, and its consequences for the family, his music and all ‘Jewish’ music under the Nazis. In the course of making it, I began to find out about Fanny, my direct ancestor, who immediately seemed to me a much more interesting character.
Then I heard the story of the ‘Easter Sonata’, which Fanny mentions once in her diary (not discovered or published until the 1990s). It resurfaced as a manuscript in 1970s Paris, and was recorded as an unknown masterpiece by Felix Mendelssohn: a barnstorming, adventurous, technically demanding work written in the year after Beethoven died. But nobody paid much attention until around 2010, when a young graduate student heard a bootleg recording of it, recognised it as being Fanny’s style, not Felix’s, and set out to prove her case.