Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn Come Alive in a New Production Off-Broadway.
- 6 days ago
- 7 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
Updated Wednesday 8, 10pm
Berlin, 1828. A piano. A woman who will die with most of her music unpublished. And a playwright who has the rare good sense to let that injustice speak for itself.
Fanny: A Fantasy in G, Tim McGillicuddy's new play presented by Off-Brand Opera at the Gural Theatre at A.R.T./New York, tells the story of Fanny Mendelssohn — composer, woman, Jew, sister of Felix — and her lifelong struggle to claim her voice in a world not yet prepared to welcome it. McGillicuddy neither sensationalizes nor reaches for false modern parallels. He simply shows what happened, in a parlor, at a piano, over the course of a life. That discipline is the play's greatest strength.
Fanny: A Fantasy in G is a play about a forgotten woman, a vanishing world, and a family trying to hold beauty together against forces it cannot name and cannot stop. It is beautifully written, beautifully directed, and played with intelligence and care throughout.
Let me begin where the play itself begins and ends: the piano. Seated at it throughout, dressed entirely in black, is the figure the production calls the Muse — played with quiet, devastating presence by Melody Fader. She is always there. She never leaves. She plays. She watches. She waits. The production calls her the Muse. I see in her Morgan le Fay — the Arthurian sorceress of death and enchantment transposed into a Berlin salon. She is the unblinking reminder that genius is mortal, that beauty is borrowed, that time is always running out. Dressed in black and seated at that piano, she accompanies every joy and every loss with equal serenity. In a play about a Jewish family in a Germany that did not yet exist but was already dreaming of itself, her presence carries an additional, unbearable weight. We know what is coming. She seems to know it too.
Melody Fader (the Muse) "Played with quiet, devastating presence by Melody Fader." She inhabits silence the way great musicians inhabit a rest — not as absence, but as the thing that gives everything around it meaning.
The Mendelssohn household is rendered as a greenhouse — a place of seedlings, of cultivated talent, of warmth and contained possibility. At its center stand two figures that resist the designation of “supporting roles.” Rufus Collins as Abraham Mendelssohn is the bourgeois patriarch in the fullest sense: capitalist, altruist, philanthropist. He funds beauty and enables his family’s creativity while, we learn, quietly and secretly aiding the Jewish community in the Berlin ghetto — operating in the shadows because the shadows are all that is available to him. Úna Clancy as Lea Mendelssohn is, if anything, more formidable still. She is the true architect of the family’s emotional architecture, and Clancy never lets you forget it. These are the pillars on which everything else rests, and both actors seem to know it.
Everything rests, too, on a question that runs beneath the music like an underground current: who are we? The Mendelssohns, like much of the Jewish bourgeoisie in 19th-century Berlin, were engaged in the profound and ultimately tragic project of becoming German. Not Prussian, not Polish, not visibly Jewish — German. This was not merely social aspiration. It was a response to something in the air: the Romantic nationalist dream of Germania, the Kaiser’s call to all Germanic peoples to unite under a shared language, blood, and destiny. A nation being willed into existence. The Mendelssohns wanted to be part of it. The nation, in the end, would decide otherwise.
Rufus Collins (Abraham Mendelssohn) "Rufus Collins as Abraham Mendelssohn is the bourgeois patriarch in the fullest sense: capitalist, altruist, philanthropist." Collins finds the man beneath the archetype — generous, conflicted, and utterly believable.
These questions have a way of following you. Working on a film about Peter Paul Weischenk — the cinematographer who fled Berlin in 1933 — and before that on a project concerning composer George Bristow and the construction of American national identity, the same unresolved tensions keep surfacing. What does it cost to build a national identity in the nineteenth century? And what does it cost those who are allowed to contribute to that project only on borrowed terms? Academia today circles this endlessly and often arrives nowhere. McGillicuddy does not circle it. He puts it in a room, seats it at a dinner table, and lets it eat with the family.
These questions are not of the past. Berlin and New York are asking them again right now, in different registers and with different accents. That the play never makes this argument explicitly is, again, a measure of its intelligence.
Úna Clancy (Lea Mendelssohn) "Úna Clancy as Lea Mendelssohn is the architect of the family's emotional architecture, and Clancy never lets you forget it." Every scene she inhabits shifts in her direction. That is not a small thing.
McGillicuddy and director George Abud solve the challenge of spanning decades with similar economy — dimming the lights and moving forward, past the deaths of Abraham and Lea, past the accumulated weight of years, with a simplicity that feels almost musical. The transgenerational burden lands without being announced.
And then there is the music. This is not a musical. It is a play in which music breathes. You are not watching performers sing their emotions. You are sitting next to a piano in a Berlin salon and the music is simply happening, the way it would have happened then — as the atmosphere of a life. The works of Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn fill the Gural Theatre with a beauty the drama alone could not produce. You hear it. You feel it. You are inside it.
Abud’s direction is assured and, at its best, quietly inventive. One gesture in particular stayed with me: at moments of particular weight, when something essential is being said at the center of the stage, the actors in the background slip into a forced slow motion. The world slows to let the words land. It is the kind of touch that works precisely because it does not call attention to itself.
Annalisa Chamberlin (Fanny Mendelssohn) "There is no grand gesture, no unnecessary emphasis — only a deep, human sadness that lingers." Chamberlin does not play Fanny. She carries her. And when the character dies, something in the room dies with her — slowly, without warning, the way real things end.
Annalisa Chamberlin brings to the role of Fanny a performance of quiet intensity and emotional clarity. There is, above all, a palpable passion in her playing—never forced, never excessive, but sustained with conviction throughout.
Part of the play’s tension lies in the way Fanny negotiates her desires among the suitors—hesitation giving way to curiosity, resistance softening, expectations subtly shifting. In those moments, Chamberlin moves along a delicate edge, where the allure of the historical figure and the presence of the actor begin to blur. One senses how easily that boundary can dissolve, how the pull operates on more than one level at once.
Daniel David Stewart (Wilhelm Hensel) "Daniel David Stewart's Wilhelm arrives like a window thrown open in a shuttered room — and the play breathes differently whenever he is on stage." He brings to the painter a warmth so unguarded, a devotion so effortless, that you understand immediately why Fanny chooses him — not despite the world's disapproval, but beyond it. In his presence, love seems not only possible but inevitable.
Her dismay, and ultimately the death of her character on stage, is particularly poignant. There is no grand gesture, no unnecessary emphasis—only a deep, human sadness that lingers.
Chamberlin’s work suggests an actor fully engaged, guided by instinct as much as by craft. One is left not only with the impression of a strong performance, but with something more difficult to name—and not easily forgotten.
The Missing Files
A word on what is at stake beyond this production. Most of Fanny's compositions were unpublished in her lifetime. She composed close to 500 works, and after her death her name was known mainly through the lens of her famous brother (Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center).
The recovery of her music has been slow, and at times startling. Her Easter Sonata, written in 1828, was lost for 150 years. When a manuscript surfaced in 1970 signed "F. Mendelssohn," it was attributed to Felix and recorded under his name. Only in 2010 did musicologist Angela Mace Christian verify the handwriting as Fanny's (The Morgan Library & Museum). The piece was not premiered under her own name until 2012 — nearly two centuries after she composed it.
To understand what was lost, it helps to place her alongside her contemporaries. Clara Schumann — pianist, composer, and close friend to Brahms — managed to build a performing career and publish her own work, yet even she watched her compositions gradually fade from the canon after her death, reduced to a supporting role in someone else's story. Amy Beach, the first major American woman composer to achieve wide recognition, fought a different but equally exhausting battle: a culture that praised her as an anomaly while declining to make room for what she represented. What these three women share is not merely talent suppressed by convention. It is the deeper injury of having their work scattered, misattributed, or simply left unperformed — a loss that belongs not to them alone, but to the history of music itself.
The rediscovery of Fanny's manuscripts, including her masterpiece Das Jahr (The Year) — a piano cycle of remarkable depth and ambition — has led to increased study, performance, and recording of her music. The Hensel Pushers project makes free PDF editions of her scores available online; as of late 2025 it hosts 193 free editions of her original works. Her music can be heard today on Apple Music and Spotify, including recordings of Das Jahr, the Piano Trio in D minor, and the Easter Sonata. For those who want to go deeper, R. Larry Todd's biography Fanny Hensel: The Other Mendelssohn remains the standard scholarly life. And Sheila Hayman's 2023 documentary Fanny: The Other Mendelssohn — made by Fanny's own great-great-great-granddaughter — is an essential entry point.
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