Anna Fernow
An amateur German artist with whom Tchaikovsky briefly corresponded in 1879. She painted the painting Melancholy, which she presented to the composer through Iosif Kotek, who became acquainted with her family in Berlin in the spring of 1879 [1]. Although there were several Fernow sisters, it has now been established [2] that the author of Melancholy was Anna Fernow (b. 1844), the older sister of the Prussian-born American forester Bernhard Eduard Fernow (1851–1923) and of Sophie Fernow (b. 1859), who studied under Hans von Bülow and later also emigrated to America where she worked as a piano teacher in Baltimore and the New York area. Another sibling seems to have been Hermann Fernow, the deputy of Tchaikovsky's Berlin-based concert agent, Hermann Wolff.
The painting Melancholy to this day hangs over the composer's bed in his house at Klin
Correspondence with Tchaikovsky
One letter from Tchaikovsky to Anna Fernow has survived, dating from 1879, and has been translated into English on this website:
- Letter 1332a – 12/24 November 1879, from Berlin.
Bibliography
Notes and References
- ↑ See Polina Vaidman, Чайковский и семья Фернов. История одной картины и неизвестного письмо композитора [Tchaikovsky and the Fernow Family. The Story of One Painting and an Unknown Letter by the Composer] (2003), p. 349–354 & penultimate page of Photographs section.
- ↑ Information received from the Tchaikovsky House-Museum at Klin, April 2012.
