Filmmaker Sheila Hayman’s new documentary, “Fanny: The Other Mendelssohn,” premiered last month in London, takes as its subject Hayman’s great-great-great-grandmother, the prolific composer Fanny Hensel. The film provides the rare experience of viewing a documentary devoted to one woman composer, its thorough research portraying Fanny as both a musical genius who composed masterpieces and a […]
Author Archives: Sarah Fritz
Sarah Fritz is a music historian and advocate for women composers on social media. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including the New York Times. She is writing a book about Clara Schumann.
Posted inInterview
Questioning Posterity
When La Boîte à Pépites (The Jewel Box) was announced as a new record label for women composers, I was cautious in my optimism. But founder Héloïse Luzzati shared a vision not about exclusion, but about uplifting voices: a project whose goal is not to record a composer just because she is a woman, but […]
Posted inInterview
Love Seeps Through
South-African soprano Golda Schultz is a regular at the Met and at Bayerische Staatsoper. In 2020, she sang at the Last Night of the Proms; this season she made her debut with the New York Philharmonic. With this career stability, she’s confronting the luxurious challenge of “moving the needle” for women composers and women’s stories. […]
Posted inReport
Wieck Spot
For all her infamous name recognition, performances of Clara Wieck Schumann’s works are still puzzlingly rare. For decades I never questioned this; I bought the industry-wide indoctrination of “low quality.” But when I began to objectively look and listen, I realized Wieck’s compositions were filled with innovative tonal relationships, thematically unified structures, advanced motivic developments, […]