CULTURE, GENDER AND SEXUALITY

The despair and alienation in Franz Schubert's works, particularly his songs, is often related to his purported sexual deviance. Is this explanation legitimate and credible?

The despair and alienation in Franz Schubert's works, particularly his songs, is often related to his purported sexual deviance.

Introduction

The paper examines the historical reception of Franz Schubert as conveyed through the gendered imagery and language of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European culture.

The concept of Schubert as a feminine type vaulted into prominence in 1838 when Robert Schumann described the composer's Mädchencharakter ("girlish" character), by contrast to the purportedly more masculine, more heroic Beethoven. (Brown, 1958)What attracted Schumann to Schubert's music and marked it as feminine is evident in some of Schumann's own works that echo those of Schubert's in intriguing ways. (Gibbs, 2000)

Schubert's supposedly feminine quality acted upon the popular consciousness also through the writers and artists -- in German-speaking Europe but also in France and England -- whose fictional characters perform and hear Schubert's music. The figures discussed include Musset, Sand, Nerval, Maupassant, George Eliot, Henry James, Beardsley, Whistler, Storm, Fontane, and Heinrich and Thomas Mann. (Brett, 1997)

Over time, Schubert's stature became inextricably entwined with concepts of the distinct social roles of men and women, especially in domestic settings. For a composer whose reputation was principally founded upon musical genres that both the public and professionals construed as most suitable for private performance, the lure to locate Schubert within domestic spaces and to attach to him the attributes of its female occupants must have been irresistible. (Newbould, 1997)

The story told is not without its complications, as this book reveals in an analysis of the response to Schubert in England, where the composer's eminence was questioned by critics whose arguments sometimes hinged on the more problematic aspects of gender in Victorian culture. (Gibbs, 2000)

Disucssion

Schubert's music bridges the classical and romantic styles and is known for its simplicity and depth of feeling. He often juxtaposes moods within a piece, evoking, for example, both sadness and conviviality.

In its supposedly "feminine character," Schubert's music was long regarded as the antithesis of Beethoven's. In the words of the nineteenth-century composer and critic Robert Schumann, who first articulated the opposition, the feminine Schubert "pleads and persuades where the man [Beethoven] commands."

Schubert's unfinished Symphony in B Minor (1822) is noted for its haunting quality and harmonic daring. Despite his reputation as a loveable and readily understandable composer, Schuhert is a great imponderable. Although he has been much stereo typed as both an artist- outsider, he left few clues to either his aesthetic principles or his sense of identity His early biographers presented him in terms stamped by inferiority which have stuck to his music and problematized its canonical standing. Schubert is the only “great composer” who comes down to us as naïve, passive, self-indulgent, childlike and feminine; Mozart is a bear by comparison. Recent discussion has added the possibility of homosexuality to the mixture, shaking up the ostentatiously heterosexual mise-en-scene of classical ...