ABSTRACT
Fanny Hensel was an artist in the most exalted sense of the word just as she shone as a gifted and accomplished pianist, so do the works only recently published under her own name testify to that heartfelt depth of feeling fundamental to a lofty and noble creation. The Jewish salon culture into which she was born could be considered part of her identity, following Jewish emancipation in the early decades of the nineteenth century, in that she continued and expanded a tradition she inherited, but also in that it directly coloured her reception. Wagner's criticism, first, of the linkage of music with Bildung in Fanny and Felix's parental home, and, secondly, his pejorative linkage of the Jewish with the feminine in salon culture have both directly affected the reception of Hensel's music. Whereas cultural studies champion the marginalized and oppressed, Fanny Hensel's position was paradoxical in that she was marginalized as a Jewish woman.
