ABSTRACT
Fanny Hensel’s Das Jahr, a cycle of twelve piano pieces after the months of the year and Nachspiel, has attracted an unprecedented amount of attention for the composer since its modern premiere and first edition (1986 and 1989), and further stimulated the burgeoning rediscovery of her music, a process that began timidly in the 1970s, some 130 years after her death, gained force in the 1980s and 1990s, and continues unabated today. In a few years Das Jahr has become a kind of cheval de bataille for proponents of Fanny’s music, including pianists and a growing number of scholars. The composing manuscript, notated between August and December 1841, was passed down through generations of her family before its acquisition by the Mendelssohn Archiv of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, where it bears the shelfmark MA 47. Used for the first commercial recording in 1986, this manuscript also served as the principal source for the edition by Liana Gavrila Serbescu and Barbara Heller published by Furore Press in 1989. But eight years later, the Mendelssohn Archiv acquired a second autograph of the work (shelfmark MA 155), which has forced dramatically a reappraisal of the composition.
