How Fanny Mendelssohn’s “Hiob Cantata” Inspired Me to Become a Screenwriter

On a Wednesday morning in 1989, I sat in a lecture hall with about 300 other Berklee College of Music sophomores, 85 percent of them male. Onstage, professor Dennis LeClaire spoke with a confidence that belied his comb over.

“Any final questions?” he asked. It was the last day of class.

Trembling, a nineteen-year-old tenor saxophone major from Albuquerque more comfortable playing my horn than speaking to crowds, I raised my hand.

“Yes, Miss Valdes?”

All eyes snapped to me. I took a deep breath and stood. “Um, so I’ve sat through two years of your history of classical music class, and you haven’t mentioned a single woman. Like not even one. I’m just, you know. Why is that?”

LeClaire smiled, inhaled importantly through his nose, lifted his chin even higher, and said, “I haven’t mentioned any women, Miss Valdes, because I teach history as pertains to the greats, and in classical music there have been no women greats.”

The answer was so brutal, and his conviction so complete, that I just stood there, speechless, unsure of where to put my arms. My heart sank as I began to realize that being a (woman) musician might be harder than I had anticipated. I did not lack talent, but I was starting to suspect talent wouldn’t be enough in a world of men like Dennis LeClaire.

I’d been raised by progressive academics to question authority. So the day after LeClaire’s misogynist pronouncement, I marched to the Boston Public Library in Copley Square (pre-smartphone, pre-internet). A librarian led me to the one book in that entire building on women classical music composers. It was pink, on a low shelf.

I checked the book out, plopped down with it on a bench on the wide grassy median of Commonwealth Avenue, and read the whole thing in one afternoon beneath gently swaying trees. One name and story stood out: Fanny Mendelssohn. I’d had to learn her brother Felix’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream” symphony for my conducting class final. The book said that Wolfgang Von Goethe, a friend of the Mendelssohn family’s, had heard Felix and Fanny both play piano as young children and concluded that while both were prodigies, “the girl is better.”

I ran to Tower Records on Newbury Street, to ask about recordings of Fanny’s music. They had nothing. I went to the library at Berklee, asked about Fanny Mendelssohn recordings, or scores. Nothing. I wanted—needed—to hear her music. I knew that without recordings, or scores, LeClaire would never be convinced. Still, I believed the book, that she was also a prodigy, the equal or superior of her brother. I even put scraps of paper in LeClaire’s faculty mailbox one a day for weeks, with brief biographies of the women I’d found there.

My senior year, I wrote about the sexism I’d experienced at Berklee, including LeClaire’s comments, and sent my essay to the Boston Globe. The newspaper ran the piece, leading to major institutional changes at my college, including adding a “women in music history” class and sensitivity training for professors. I graduated a couple of weeks after the piece ran, and Bonnie Raitt was our commencement speaker. I was stunned when she handed me my diploma and asked me if I was the girl who’d written the article about sexism at the school. I told her I was, and she smiled sadly and shook her head, and said, “It doesn’t get any better out here. You could do a lot of good in journalism, to change that.”

I’d always loved writing, and from the time I was a kid I wrote for fun. After the Berklee article, I decided to let music become the thing I did for fun, and writing would be the thing I did for a living. At heart, I was a poet and novelist, but I thought it made more financial sense to chase a professional writing degree. I went to Columbia for a master’s in journalism, returning to the Globe a week after graduating, as a staff writer.

When my son was born in 2001, I left daily journalism to write novels, so I could have more control of my time, as well as more control of the cultural narrative. It was a big gamble, but it paid off. My first book, “The Dirty Girls Social Club,” debuted on the New York Times bestseller list. The novel presents Latinas as racially, religiously, and economically diverse human beings—something newspapers hadn’t allowed me to do.

At age thirty-four, I hit a glass ceiling I’d never even realized could exist.

With my toddler son playing by my side, I wrote my second novel, “Autumn Leaves,” about an Irish American female jazz saxophonist who goes to a school a lot like Berklee. Confident I’d “made it,” I hit send, shooting the new book off to my editor at St. Martin’s Press. A few days later, as my son and I drew in our driveway with sidewalk chalk, I got an email back. My editor wrote to say the manuscript was “absolutely beautiful,” but refused to buy it because “it’s not in your brand.”

I blinked at the screen for a long moment. I had a brand? And here I was, thinking I was a novelist, able, like TC Boyle perhaps, to write about anything that interested me.

I called her, to clarify what she meant.

“Latina chick lit,” was my brand, she said. “No one will believe you can write authentically about being a white jazz musician.”

“But my mom is Irish American,” I explained. “And I am a jazz musician. The book is pretty much autobiographical!”

It didn’t matter. What mattered was that the first book had made a bunch of money, and in capitalism when that happens, companies want to make it happen again. And the only reason anyone in the corporate publishing world could come up with for the success of my novel was my ethnicity.

At age thirty-four, I hit a glass ceiling I’d never even realized could exist. I could be a famous author, but only if my fiction adhered to stereotypes of Latinos and not my actual life.

I quickly wrote another “chica lit” book, to pay the bills. Then another. And another. St. Martin’s bought them. But each new book was less sincere than the last. I’m sure my readers felt it. By the time I was forty-two, ten years since my first novel was published, my book sales declined drastically. I had twelve published novels, but was unable to sell a thirteenth, because in corporate publishing you are only as interesting as your last book’s sales. Almost as quickly as it had begun, it seemed my book career was over.

It was devastating to realize, at forty-three, that I was a has-been. I wallowed in self-pity for a minute, but quickly realized that was a waste of time. Life went on. It was up to me to give mine meaning.

I focused on raising my son, and took day jobs in marketing, media relations, and communications. I found comfort in Buddhism, hiking, baking. I found ways to embrace my seeming irrelevance, and tried to let this open my heart to the suffering of humanity rather than close it down.

One day, driving my son to school, I heard something on the radio that changed my life yet again: a heartbreaking, lush symphony, raging with quiet intensity. It spoke to me, in that moment, on that path, in a way nothing else ever had.

Thanks to LeClaire’s classes, I was usually pretty good at identifying “the greats” by ear, but I could not place this composer. I sensed the rigid structuralism of Beethoven, the playfulness of Mozart, the nod to folk themes of Bartok, the floral dreamscapes of Debussey. My God. It was a masterpiece.

When the music ended, I realized I had pulled into a parking lot at a church to listen to it, with tears in my eyes. The announcer said that it was “Hiob Cantata,” by Fanny Mendelssohn. Goosebumps rose across my arms, and I began to sob. Fanny’s descendants had just made more than 400 of her compositions public, for the first time in 180 years. Her work was finally being recorded. Critics were saying she was probably better than her brother.

A great after all.

I dropped off my son, and drove home in silence. I barely breathed. I didn’t want any other sound in my ears. Just the echoes of Fanny’s piece. The interior of the car felt like a mausoleum, a ghost riding shotgun. I sped home and plopped down at my old iMac.

I googled her name, typing it out for the first time in twenty years. Recent news articles popped up, all saying basically the same thing the radio announcer had: The family had kept her compositions secret until now. But why? What the hell?

I found a few YouTube videos of musicians performing these newly discovered pieces. One of the videos was an all-women quartet at a conservatory. I watched it dozens of times, tears flowing down my face, because here was proof, here was her voice, here was her beauty and brilliance rising up across the centuries, flowing from female hands.

I did nothing else that day until it was time to pick up my son.

The next day, I ordered every book I could find about Fanny Mendelssohn, which was only three books. These included a collection of letters passed among the members of her family. In one letter, her father Abraham says she has to stop performing music publicly now that she’s fifteen and a woman. Music would be a vocation for her brother, he said, but for her it must be nothing but “an ornament.” He commands her to stop embarrassing the family by playing with so much “masculine” passion. In other words, he tells her that being a great and universal composer of symphonies simply wasn’t in her brand.

She did as she was told.

Fanny was born November 14, 1805, in Berlin. I read her letters, and my mouth opened with small, regular gasps, my skin rose in goosebumps. Her own words. Her mind, in words, private correspondences with her parents, siblings, cousins. Hundreds of them. Even at age eleven, Fanny had written with wit, grace, eloquence. With genius. She was funny, self-deprecating, hinting at her reluctance to marry, but dutiful and accommodating, loving, measured, pleasant.

As Fanny got older, the humor in her letters is replaced with a sort of melancholy; dutiful descriptions of domestic life, seemingly symbolic descriptions of changing seasons, gardens, weather, God. She spoke of being tired, and sad. She spoke of turning to pastries for comfort.

She also kept writing music. She even convinced Felix to pass off the wedding march she wrote for herself as his own, and he complied. Felix, in his letters, is supportive of her creativity, and asks her advice on everything he composes. At first, as a young wife and mother in her early twenties, she wrote the small, cheerful domestic pieces expected of her. But later she began to experiment, and confessed as much to her brother in letters. As Felix traveled the world, gaining fame and fortune as a composer and pianist, Fanny watched from home, prisoner to time, place, and marriage. Her pieces grew bigger, more dissonant, filled with fire and anger. When her father died, she felt great sorrow, but also new freedom. Nearing forty, she set aside all convention and, finally, wrote a symphony, for a full orchestra and chorus, against every accepted norm. This was “Hiob Cantata.”

Two years later, she died of a stroke.

She’d had enough answering to men; Fanny had determined to answer only to the God who had given her this talent.

I finally understood why I’d sobbed in that church parking lot that morning, upon hearing “Hiob Cantata.” The piece itself, sung in German, is, on the surface, a recounting of Job’s suffering as a test of his belief in God. But the phrase “Was Is Der Mench,” repeated over and over in the opening, translates to “What is a human being?” She’d had enough answering to men; Fanny had determined to answer only to the God who had given her this talent. Fanny had lived through a similar kind of marginalization to the ones I’d faced. She’d been told to stay in her place, to make herself smaller than she actually was. “Hiob Cantata” was Fanny defying orders; it reached out to me across 180 years and shook me out of complying with my own minimization.

I still had stories to tell. And the story I most wanted to tell was Fanny’s. To hell with any fool who might say the life of a Jewish-turned-Lutheran woman composer in 1800s Prussia wasn’t in my brand.

I began writing Fanny’s story as a book, but I found myself embedding links into the text, to recordings, so that people could hear her music. To know Fanny Mendelssohn you had to hear her music. And as I’d learned in college, a book could never truly reveal her greatness to anyone.

I had never written a screenplay, but I would have to learn how.

It’s not easy for novelists to write movies, that’s what people in Hollywood like to say. But I wasn’t just a novelist. I was a musician who’d learned to be a journalist because I needed to, to expose injustice. Then I was a journalist who learned to write novels, because I needed to, to expose injustice. I could do this.

I quit the day jobs, and immersed myself in film. For five years, I watched films, read scripts, transcribed scripts from the screen. I read books on screenwriting. I studied the craft, always with Fanny’s ghost at my side. My parents helped me with my bills, and believed in me.

At last, I wrote the screenplay about Fanny Mendelssohn. I sent it off, unagented, to a famous independent film producer I admired, and he immediately called to say he wanted to make the movie. He found a financier and a director, whom I flew out to Los Angeles to meet.

So it was that this spring, more than twenty years after that day in class with LeClaire, I sat at the bar at the Jonathan Club on the beach in Santa Monica, for the first production meeting on the film MENDELSSOHN.

As we discussed casting and the film began to become real, I realized something that made me fight back tears: This film is an opportunity to help rescue Fanny Mendelssohn from near-obscurity; and to do the same for me. Thanks to “Hiob Cantata,” I will never again allow powerful, prejudiced people to dictate for me what my limitations are as an artist. I will never again make myself smaller, creatively, in order to appease a capitalist machine that denies its own racism, and obscenely calls its deluded commitment to my one-dimensionality “diversity.”

“Hiob Cantata” asked one question: “What is a human being?” and Fanny Mendelssohn answered it in counterpoint, melody, meter and harmony.

She was. She was a human being.

And so am I.

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