Songs Without Words

Songs Without Words (or, The Mendelssohn Play)

Wednesday, September, 3 and Friday, September 6

Songs Without Words (or, The Mendelssohn Play), an award-winning solo play from SMC alumna Jennifer Vosters ’16, will be performed on Wednesday,  September 3 and Friday, September 5 at the Moreau Center for the Arts. Both performances will start at 7:30pm, with audience talkbacks to follow.

Songs Without Words is the humorous, heartbreaking true story of one artistic soul inhabiting two very different artists. Featuring Vosters’s tour-deforce performance as siblingcomposers Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn, Songs Without Words wrestles enduring questions of gender and genius, family and fame, siblinghood and the power of art.

Fanny Mendelssohn was a 19th-century composer who, like most women of the time, was not permitted to be a professional musician. Her younger brother Felix, famous for masterpieces like The Wedding March and Hark! The Herald Angels Sing, soared to stardom while she remained relatively obscure, until recent interest in her music has propelled her into the spotlight.

Songs Without Words won the 2024 M. Elizabeth Osborn Award from the American Theatre Critics Association, a national award recognizing outstanding new plays from emerging playwrights. It was also named Critics’ Pick of the Fringe at the Cincinnati Fringe Festival, Pick of the Fringe and Audience 
Favorite at the Green Bay Fringe Festival, Best International Show at the Saskatoon Fringe Festival, Venue Pick and Members’ Pick at the Minnesota 
Fringe Festival, and a semifinalist in The Understudy’s Freshly Brewed series.

Alan Jozwiak of the League of Cincinnati Theatres called Songs Without Words "a rich and beautiful tapestry of two composers’ lives that is well told 
and wonderfully acted.” “An astonishing, triumphant harmony…Songs Without Words is a revelation,” wrote Julia Peterson of the Saskatoon StarPhoenix. Rob Hubbard of the Pioneer Press called it “a masterpiece.”

While lovers of history and music will find much to enjoy, Vosters stresses that Songs Without Words is a story for everybody—no classical music knowledge required. “It’s about sibling love and sibling rivalry, it’s about family, it’s about trying and failing and trying again to live up to your potential,” she says.

Run time is 60 minutes, no intermission.