Fanny Mendelssohn

Mendelssohn was born in Hamburg, the oldest of four children, including her brother Felix Mendelssohn born four years after her. She was descended on both sides from distinguished Jewish families; her parents were Abraham Mendelssohn (who was the son of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn), and Lea, née Salomon, a granddaughter of the entrepreneur Daniel Itzig. She was baptised as a Christian in 1816, becoming Fanny Cäcilie Mendelssohn Bartholdy. Despite this, she and her family continued an affinity with the social and moral values of Judaism. Like her brother Felix, she objected strongly when their father Abraham changed the family surname to "Mendelssohn Bartholdy" with the intention of playing down their Jewish origins: she wrote to Felix of "Bartholdy, that name which we all dislike."

While growing up in the family's new home in Berlin, Mendelssohn showed prodigious musical ability and began to write music. She received her first piano instruction from her mother, who may have learned the Berlin Bach tradition through the writings of Johann Kirnberger, a student of Johann Sebastian Bach. Thus as a 14 year old, Mendelssohn could already play all 24 preludes from Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier from memory alone, and she did so in honour of her father's birthday in 1819. Beyond inspiration from her mother, Mendelssohn may also have been influenced by the role-models represented by her great-aunts Fanny von Arnstein and Sarah Levy, both lovers of music, the former the patroness of a well-known salon and the latter a skilled keyboard player in her own right.

After studying briefly with the pianist Marie Bigot in Paris, Mendelssohn and her brother Felix received piano lessons from Ludwig Berger and composition instruction from Carl Friedrich Zelter. At one point, Zelter favoured Fanny over Felix: he wrote to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1816, in a letter introducing Abraham Mendelssohn to the poet, "He has adorable children and his oldest daughter could give you something of Sebastian Bach. This child is really something special." Both Mendelssohn and her brother Felix received instruction in composition from Zelter starting in 1819. In October 1820, they joined the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin, which was then being led by Zelter.Much later, in an 1831 letter to Goethe, Zelter described Fanny's skill as a pianist with the highest praise for a woman at the time: "... she plays like a man." Visitors to the Mendelssohn household in the early 1820s, including Ignaz Moscheles and Sir George Smart, were equally impressed by both siblings.