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Music
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Franz Schubert
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by TB
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IN
1988, musicologist Maynard Solomon presented a controversial paper
to members of the American Musicological Society at their annual
meeting in Baltimore. In the paper, the homosexuality of Franz Schubert
(1797-1828) is discussed from a rigorous historical and psychoanalytic
perspective. Solomon's conclusions, while primarily speculative, seem
persuasive in asserting that the legendary composer and musician was
not merely a homosexual, but also an avid boy-lover secretly engaged in
relationships with pubertal-age boys.
Solomon builds his case slowly. He begins by citing a letter to Joseph
von Spaun of November 27, 1825, from Anton Ottenwalt, a member of
Schubert's circle of friends and acquaintances, where Ottenwalt
observed that Schubert was subject to "the passions of an eagerly
burning sensuality." Josef Kenner, once a young friend of Schubert,
wrote in 1858 that Schubert's "body, strong as it was, succumbed to the
cleavage in his -- souls -- as I would put it, of which one pressed
heavenwards and the other bathed in slime."
Such inferences were frequently made about Schubert, implying to some
biographers that he patronized female prostitutes. However, later
biographers have noted that few men of Schubert's generation in Vienna
regarded relationships with prostitutes as immoral, let alone as signs
of moral degradation. Solomon notes that the chastity commissions of
Empress Maria Theresa had long since been abandoned, and prostitution
flourished in the Austrian capital, as in most of Europe's cities.
According to a contemporary traveler, ordinary Viennese had "no great
need of streetwalkers or stews, in a city where every liaison which a
stranger may choose to form, can be carried on, without offense to
morals, even in his own hotel or lodgings." Although Schubert
apparently contracted syphilis, which led to his hospitalization
sometime in 1823 and to a painful convalescence continuing until 1825
or 1826, there is little historical evidence to indicate Schubert's
heterosexuality. For several years, he claimed to be courting Therese
Grob (probably between 1814 and 1816), but she told Schubert's first
biographer, Kreissle von Hellborn, that Schubert "was like an adopted
son" in her father's house; she gave no hint that there had been any
special intimacy between her and Schubert. Some evidence to the
contrary indicates that Schubert's relationship with Grob was little
more than a subterfuge to deflect his family's concern that he might be
homosexual. And Solomon states that "there is no evidence that Schubert
ever courted another woman."
In August 1826, the dramatist and close Schubert confidante Eduard
Bauernfeld became more specific about Schubert's likely pederastic
leanings, writing in his diary, "Schubert is out of sorts. He needs
`young peacocks,' like Benvenuto Cellini," who was formally charged
with and convicted of sodomy on two occasions and accused of it several
times more -- always with a preference for boys aged around 12 to 14.
For
his adolescent apprentice Paulino, Cellini wrote in his memoirs of
"conceiving the strongest affection... that the human breast can hold."
***Solomon hints that Schubert took under his wing Johann Michael Vogl
when Vogl was 13; Vogl later and frequently referred to Schubert as his
"second father." Though this relationship may not have involved
sleeping together, Solomon speaks of Schubert "launching his pursuit of
Cellini's peacocks" shortly thereafter, and alludes that this pursuit
may well account for the outraged and moralistic tone of those who
described Schubert as "bathed in slime" or gripped by passions
mauvaises. ***
In fact, Solomon doubts that even a confession of male
homosexuality -- in an age when overt dandyism abounded -- would have
been
met with such outcries. "Rather," concludes Solomon, "what may have
impelled some observers of Schubert's behavior to speak of abominations
and vile practices was the prospect of sexual relations between a man
and a youth (or boy), with its connotations of child molestation and
its glimpse of a taboo realm of experience."
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From
the NAMBLA Bulletin, Vol. 16, No. 2, Pgs. 38 - 39,
Aug. 1995
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Copyright © NAMBLA, 2008
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