The Blank
Sheet

Berlin, 1829. A painter marries a composer, and every morning does one small thing.

Fanny Mendelssohn could play the whole of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier from memory by the age of thirteen. Her brother Felix, a year her junior, became one of the most celebrated composers in Europe. She was, by every account that survives, his equal.¹

The difference between them was not talent. It was permission. Their father told Fanny plainly that music could be an ornament for her but a profession for him, something to help her find a husband and take her place as a wife.² Felix, whom she loved and trusted above almost anyone, encouraged her to compose in private and discouraged her from publishing.³ For years some of her songs appeared in print under his name. One of them turned out to be Queen Victoria’s favourite, and he had to confess, to the Queen, that it was his sister’s.⁴

Then, at twenty-four, she married a painter named Wilhelm Hensel.

Hensel was a different kind of man, and he made a condition of his own before the wedding. He told her he would not marry her unless she kept composing.⁵ They set up house with a studio for each of them, side by side, and worked through the day in adjacent rooms, hers full of sound, his full of paint.⁶

Each morning, before he left to paint, he set a fresh sheet of blank manuscript paper on her stand.

That is the whole of it. He did not write the music. He did not ask to see it, or improve it, or attach his name to it. He cleared a space and trusted her to fill it. She set his poems to music; he drew illustrations for hers.⁷ They were a composer and a painter, two different instruments, and they did not try to play each other’s part.

She wrote more than four hundred works.⁸ Most went unpublished in her lifetime, and she was nearly lost to history for a century after she died, suddenly, at forty-one.⁹ The world is only now catching up to her. But the marriage was never the thing that held her back. The marriage was the room where she could work.

We took the name Key Differences from couples like this. Two people who were genuinely unalike, who never pretended otherwise, and who found that the difference was not the threat. The threat is always the silence around it, the space one person slowly stops being allowed to take up. What the Hensels understood, and what most of us have to learn the hard way, is that love is not the blending of two people into one. It is the blank sheet on the stand. It is making room.

That is what this course is for. To help two people see their differences early, while they are still a discovery rather than a grievance, and to treat them as the most interesting thing they own.

— Adrian Melrose, Key Differences