Sources, Methods, Interpretations ora eo E BON MARCHE PROGRAMME 1 Marene da Figaro Edited by Stephen A. Crist and Roberta Montemorra Marvin10 Sex, Sexuality, and Schubert’s Piano Music JEFFREY KALLBERG Few arenas in modern musical scholarship are more fraught with contro- versy than the debates over Schubert's sexual proclivities and their possible relationship to his music. The issues strike many of us at gut level, Was he or was he not homosexual? Can listening to his music be affected by our answer to the first question? If not, are there other means by which sexual- ity can be musically expressed, and if so, how do we gain access to them? But what is the issue here? The question must be raised, for these argu- ments have been debilitated by much talking at cross-purposes. As scholars have attempted to analyze Schubert’s music in terms of sexuality (or have contributed to the dialogue on how one might—or if one should—achieve this goal), they have at times blurred the focus between historical meaning and present-day explanation, This essay will look closely at some of the terms and issues under de- bate—particularly the concepts of “sexuality” and “sex”—from a more general historical perspective. It will suggest some ways that a more nu- anced and historically informed understanding of these general concepts might affect how (and whether) we deploy them in connection with Schubert’s piano music.' To this end, and by way of conclusion, it will explore how a more finely shaded and historicized reading of sex might be brought to bear on the Piano Sonata in A Minor, D. 845 (op. 42). By accident of chronology, the case of Schubert raises a number of vexing problems from the standpoint of the history of sexuality. Indeed, the most troublesome of them is whether the phenomenon as it applies to Schubert should even be labeled sexuality at all. For sexuality, when understood in something like its modern sense—as a cultural production that configures the relationship between sexual practice and identity and that thus to some degree contributes to our personal, interior sense of self—proves to be an unstable term when examined historically. That is to say, sexuality should220 Jeffrey Kallberg stand not for a fixed, transhistorical essence, but rather for a constructed phenomenon of relatively recent origin? To claim that sexuality emerged relatively recently means in part to dis- tinguish between behavior and identity. Sexual acts and behaviors have obviously been with us forever. But, as Robert Padgug has observed, it is one thing to “commit” a sexual act of some type; it is another to “be” a homosexual, a heterosexual, or a transsexual.’ To invoke sexuality is to call upon an entire nexus of institutions, desires, and acts that together endow an identity. Before this governing concept took shape, these institu- tions, desires, and acts either existed independently from one another or were linked in different sorts of ways. The distinctions between sexuality and what preceded it—“sex”—emerge clearly in marginal or unusual situ- ations. Hermaphrodites provide an excellent example.* The long medico- legal tradition devoted to the dilemma posed by the ambiguous genitalia of hermaphrodites was, prior to the advent of sexuality, seldom concerned with finding a solution that might enable patients to obtain a measure of psycho-social stability in their identities as individuals. Instead treatises offered advice on how to determine the hermaphrodite’s “true” sex in or- der to ascertain his or her civil status with respect to ownership or inherit- ance of property. Sexual characteristics and economic institutions inter- acted in ways foreign to our modern sense of identity; indeed, one literally could not “be” a hermaphrodite in this earlier system. Plainly the development of sexuality marked a momentous and momentously complicated shift in the ways of conceiving human individu- als, one that, as Lynn Hunt has argued, would seem to be intimately con- nected with the emergence of modernity, its attendant notions of individual, and its new versions of subjectivity.’ And when did this shift take place? Here is where the matter becomes interesting and knotty with respect to Schubert, for different scholars argue for different dates both before and after the composer’s lifetime. Sometimes, in fact, the same scholar argues for a variety of dates: at different moments in the first volume of The His- tory of Sexuality, Foucault names the early seventeenth century, the early eighteenth century, the late eighteenth century, and the late nineteenth cen- tury as decisive moments in this shift. Other writers, when arguing for the precedence and significance of the emergence of different signs of sexual- ity, nearly always lobby for one of the moments articulated by Foucault. Thus Randolph Trumbach believes that the beginnings of a modern homo- sexual role (“role” here is perhaps not exactly congruent with “identity”) should be traced to the “sodomitical subcultures” of early-eighteenth-cen- tury England, whereas Arnold I. Davidson contends that the notion of sexu- ality was the product of a “psychiatric style of reasoning” that arose around the middle of the nineteenth century.’ Perhaps these scholars and others like them each describe important fragments—fragments distinct from one another both chronologically and geographically—of this massive and enig-Sex, Sexuality, and Schubert's Piano Music 221 matic concept. In other words, rather than argue that the concept of sexu- ality came into being relatively whole at a given moment in history, one might rather conclude that it emerged, unevenly and intricately in different times and at different places, over a century-and-a-half span from the early eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century. (One may productively read Foucault’s variable positions just this way, not as evidence of an in- consistency in his argument.) Hence, if sexuality figured into Schubert’s life at all, it probably did so in a way that differs to some degree from the concept we know.’ At most it would seem to have been a nascent, partially conceived force in the con- struction of identity. And Davidson’s convincing arguments about the dif- ficulty of conceiving of sexuality outside the context of a psychiatric mode of reasoning further suggest that any sexuality that was perceived around 1820 would have been quite unlike any present concept of it that we hold, perhaps most so at its boundaries with identity. (Indeed, the reception his- tory of Schubert supports Davidson's claim, particularly in the way that the trope of Schubert as feminine and effeminate Other gained momentum as the nineteenth century progressed—we shall return to this point below.) That sexuality and related categories like homosexuality may have been far from or differently construed in the minds of Schubert’s contemporar- ies does not mean that they ignored sex. Of course the Viennese (and oth- ers) noticed, engaged in, gossiped, moralized, and otherwise circulated in- formation about various sexual acts and activities, including those between people of the same sex. Speaking of the German-speaking states, Paul Derks copiously documents the manifold ways that same-sex passion figured into the wider literary public sphere between 1750 and 1850.* This evidence describes both stagings of same-sex love in novels, plays, and poems, as well as activities of authors, playwrights, dramaturges, and other partici- pants in the German literary scene. This latter variety of evidence, I might note in passing, seems suggestive with respect to the debates about Schubert’s own sexual tendencies: the kinds of same-sex social circles that Derks pro- lifically documents around authors like Johannes Miiller and Emil von Platen resonate sympathetically with the largely homosocial milieu portrayed in the documentary record of Schubert's life.’ Sometime the circles overlapped: Platen’s name, for example, often surfaced in the discussions and activities of Schubert’s personal coterie. But if the similarities between Schubert’s homosocial milieu and those of authors who unambiguously engaged in acts of same-sex love might be mustered on behalf of a reading of Schubert's sexual inclinations (a point that will hardly come as a surprise to those who have read the contribu- tions to the debate by Maynard Solomon, Kristina Muxfeldt, and David Gramit"), the question still remains whether the sexually oriented activities of Schubert either by himself or together with his band of male friends were likely to have entered into the public sphere as did those of the literary222 Jeffrey Kallberg notables described by Derks. There must have been a palpable difference between any interpretative situation that arose with Schubert's piano mu- sic and, say, the kind of public sexual scandal that surrounded August Wilhelm Iffland’s refusal in 1810 to stage Heinrich von Kleist’s Kathchen von Heilbronn. (Alluding to Iffland’s love for men, Kleist complained in a personal note to Iffland that immediately became scandalous public knowl- edge that Iffland would have accepted the play had Kaithchen been a young man."') The distinction, of course, lies precisely in the vaunted semantic vagueness of Schubert’s artistic product. Solomon addressed this issue in part when he wrote that “Schubert’s music is not a diary of his own expe- rience; his art is not circumscribed by his private obsessions and hungers.”"” Surely it is right to suppose that Schubert would not have construed his personal sexual practices as invested into the larger semantic domain that listeners might perceive in his music, particularly so if, as argued here, this sex life was not coupled to the larger interpretative field called sexuality.” But Schubert’s own perception of his practices is only part of the issue— the lesser part for those interested in questions of historical meaning dur- ing Schubert’s life. The more pressing concern is how, or whether, his audi- ences construed sexual meanings in his music. In other words, did they— could they—hear sex or sexuality when they listened to his piano music? The question is not outlandish, for diverse, if sparse, evidence testifies that some listeners from around Schubert's time did explicitly link sex and mu- sic. Nothing more strangely links the two categories together than Karl Friedrich Zelter’s startling description of Beethoven, written in a letter of September 1812 to Goethe: His works seem to me like children whose father is a woman or whose mother is a man. The last work of his that I encountered (“Christ on the Mount of Ol- ives”) seems to me like an unchaste thing whose basis and purpose are eternal death. . . . I know musical people who once found themselves alarmed, even indignant, on hearing his works and are now gripped by an enthusiasm for them like the partisans of Greek love." Just as remarkable is George Alexander Macfarren’s 1842 interpretation of Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 3 in A Minor, op. 56, in terms of passion- ate love, the climax of which arrives in his almost Joycean evocation of the Allegro maestoso assai theme that enters toward the end of the last move- ment (m, 396): But then a new light bursts upon the mind, new oil is poured upon the flame, a rock is shifted from its base, and a world of waters is let loose upon the cataract. A new subject with a quite new feeling in A major, and in six-eight time, bursts like an eye-beam on the darkened heart, and says, in signs unquestionable and irrevocable, “Yes, ever yes,” to all that undefinable craving to which the wildestSex, Sexuality, and Schubert's Piano Music 223 brain upon the pinnacle of its enthusiasm dare not, cannot give utterance. It is a joyous exultation, far beyond Hope's uttermost excitement... . it is the pang of pleasure which a lover feels at knowing that his passion dream is realized." But whose sex or sexual experience is being heard in these responses? One would be hard pressed to identify it with the composers’. Macfarren’s encomium makes no claim that the symphony (or the review) represents Mendelssohn’s attitudes toward sensuous love. Zelter’s comments are more complicated, but in brief, while he portrayed Beethoven’s compositions as resulting from a kind of monstrous birth and evincing a kind of promiscu- ity, he did not relate the sex that he heard, and in particular the “Greek love,” directly back to Beethoven himself. To the extent that listeners at this time were inclined to map narratives onto instrumental music, and to the even lesser extent that these narratives or associations concerned sex, it would have been unusual for listeners to have construed these associations as the composer telling something specific about himself. Hearing general human conditions and emotions in performances of instrumental music was not unusual in Schubert’s day; ascribing specific emotions and acts to the creator of the instrumental work happened more commonly after the middle of the century. The rhetoric of reviews around Schubert's time demonstrates this clearly. Expressions such as “the present Sonata appears to be such an effusion from the innermost heart” (the words are from A. B. Marx in 1824, in reference to Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in A-flat Major, op. 110, and to the composer’s heart) are common coin.'® It is more rare for a reviewer to offer a precise summation of the content of such an effusion. Indeed, most critics in the first third of the nineteenth century celebrated the unique power of music to avoid evoking any concrete identification with the “outer sensual world,” as E. T. A. Hoffmann put it in his essay on Beethoven’s instrumental music.'” We may observe this strategy of avoidance in a review of the Fantasy in C Major, D. 760 (“Wanderer”), printed in the Wiener Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in 1823. The anonymous critic devoted the first three paragraphs to a general assessment of the nature of the genre “Fantasy.” A fantasy is a musical piece in which a composer may allow perfectly free deploy- ment to the wings of his inventive spirit, unite the most curious forms into the greatest possible unity, and thus present our minds with a picture capable of laying, claim to our perceptive faculty in a most interesting manner by means of vivacity of color, shape and arrangement as well as variety organized into a satisfactory whole."* The reviewer's opening sally thus drew on conjoined tropes of free imagi- nation and higher artistic unity that had configured the genre since at least the mid-eighteenth century. In the fourth paragraph, however, the discussion224 Jeffrey Kallberg turned to Schubert in a way that would seem at first to allow a hermeneu- tics built around the composer’s identity: Such a piece of music may for that reason be best suited faithfully to record and reproduce the feelings that inspired the composer at the time of its creation; nay, it may properly be regarded as a mirror of his depths. Seeing that a composer like Herr Schubert, who had already betrayed such profound sentiments in his generally esteemed songs, presents us with a soul- picture of this kind, the musical world can only rejoice." Schubert, the reviewer averred, offered up to his listeners a reflected image of his soul; the Fantasy somehow enabled the auditors to reproduce the deep feelings that motivated him when he composed. And what did one find upon looking into the mirror of Schubert's depths? In fact, the reviewer remained silent on the issue: in the remainder of the article, he briefly sketched the overall shape of the Fantasy and drew spe- cial attention (as did many reviews of Schubert during his lifetime) to the composer's occasional “lapses” into harmonic license. While one might lament this silence—souls could be sexed places for the Romantics, as Su- san J. Wolfson has recently reminded us—the critic’s strategy conformed to the prevailing attitude that one should not place verbal limits on the ex- pressive powers of music.” Schubert’s soul as mirrored in the C-Major Fantasy offered a potential conduit through which to hear sex (and hence perhaps also the glimmerings of a nascent sexuality at work), but to be- moan the critic’s failure to realize this potential would be to misconstrue a significant element of contemporary reception. If, in the public sphere of the press, a review appears to sidestep the articulation of connections between Schubert’s music and his soul, then perhaps we need to examine more private communications among the composer’s intimates in order to find such correlations. And, indeed, we might be tempted to construe the following lines, from a letter that Anton Ottenwalt wrote to Josef von Spaun on 27 November 1825, as associating Schubert’s creative output with something akin to his sexual identity: Von Schubert wiifte ich nichts Dir und uns Neues zu sagen, in seinen Werken offenbart sich der Genius, der Géttliches schafft, unverwiistlich durch die Affektionen einer lebhaft begehrenden Sinnlichkeit, und fiir Freunde scheint er ein wahrhaft treues Gemiit zu haben.*! But what exactly did Ottenwalt mean to say by conjoining remarks about Schubert’s music and his sensual nature? Two published translations leave strikingly contradictory impressions of this relationship. According to Eric Blom in The Schubert Reader, Ottenwalt would claim that Schubert's mu- sic and his sensual passions were unconnected; the divine presence of the music remained unsullied by Schubert’s sensual nature: “Of Schubert I couldSex, Sexuality, and Schubert’s Piano Music 225 tell you nothing that is new to you and to us; his works proclaim a genius for divine creation, unimpaired by the passions of an eagerly burning sen- suality, and he seems to have truly devoted sentiments for friends.”2? Com- pare Joshua Rifkin’s translation, published in Christopher Gibbs’s recent biography of Schubert, which yields an entirely different sense of Ottenwalt’s intent in the central three clauses: in Schubert’s works “the genius of divine creation reveals itself irreducibly through the passions of an ardently avid sensuality.”* In this version, Ottenwalt would posit a link between Schubert’s divine musical genius and his ardent sensual nature—although what precisely it might mean for “genius to reveal itself irreducibly through passions” remains obscure. How we interpret the import of these murky phrases plainly hinges on how we understand both “unverwiistlich durch”—the difference between Blom’s “unimpaired by” and Rifkin’s “irreducibly through” largely deter- mines the different tenors of their respective versions—and “Affektionen.” And while neither translation appears to have rendered the German en- tirely accurately, the Rifkin/Gibbs version comes closer to the sense implied by the German original.2* If we understand the basic structure of the origi- nal to parse as “Genius offenbart sich durch Sinnlichkeit,” then a more literal translation of Ottenwalt’s remarks might better resemble, “Of Schubert I am aware of nothing to tell that is new to you and us, in his works genius that creates something divine reveals itself, irrepressible thanks to the dispositions of an actively desiring sensuality, and for friends he seems to have truly loyal feelings.” In other words, Ottenwalt would appear simply to observe that Schubert’s sensual nature abetted his musical genius. By reminding Spaun (“nothing that is new to you”) that Schubert’s well-known penchant for sensual plea- sure (pleasure of all sorts: “Sinnlichkeit” here cannot be limited to the sexual sphere) was the engine that drove his musical genius, Ottenwalt did little more than invoke a hoary saw about the benefits to artistic creativity of a lust for life. Nothing in what Ortenwalt wrote can be construed as imply- ing that listeners could perceive anything of Schubert's sensual nature in his music. How, then, might the categories of sex and Schubert’s piano music have converged in his day? Sexual tropes did not crop up very frequently in reactions to his piano music during his lifetime, but interestingly enough the same piece, the A-Minor Sonata, op. 42, twice evoked sexual meta- phors from critics. The first review of the Sonata, a lengthy rave in the Leipziger Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung from March 1826, replicated the structure (if not the size) of the review of the C-Major Fantasy. An involved series of musings over the title of the piece (here the critic opined that the Sonata would be better titled “Fantasy”) led to a detailed consid- eration of the content of the Sonata. Describing “the predominant expres- sion” (“der herrschende Ausdruck”) of the first movement as “a suppressed226 Jeffrey Kallberg but sometimes violently erupting somber passion, alternating with melan- choly seriousness” (“eine niedergehaltene, zuweilen aber heftig hervorbrechende, diistere Leidenschaftlichkeit, wechselnd mit schwermiithigen Ernst”), the reviewer went on to portray the second movement as Haydnesque, and the third as Beethovenian, though without faulting Schubert’s originality. He then continued, with respect to the fourth movement: What, to the stimulated mind, would be the most natural sequel after all these changing emotions? Surely an as it were generalized and elevated mood on the whole, not vehement but very lively, not sad but not light or merry either—a strong, manly, jovial mood, mixed of a greater part of seriousness and a smaller of jesting. And that is the very expression of the long, technically very well knit Finale—Allegro vivace, A minor, two-four time. An 1828 review in the Wiener Zeitschrift fiir Kunst, Literatur, Theater und Mode echoed these sentiments, but now with reference to the first move- men: Just as Herr Schubert shows himself in his songs as a worthy connoisseur of harmony and knows how to season his melodies with a beautiful background of chords, he is here seen in an almost martial mood, in which a well-chosen change of harmonies accompanies the march-like middle theme in manifold variants. The moderate tempo is very well suited to the course taken by the ideas, and the composer keeps logically to the manly character he has once chosen.2* Both reviewers discovered epitomes of manliness in different aspects of Schubert’s Sonata. Neither reviewer reached this conclusion by measuring the musical text against his sense of the composer’s self (the “he” in the second review is plainly “Schubert the worthy connoisseur of harmony,” not “Schubert the virile man”). Rather the manliness accrued to the ge- neric referent in the first movement (martial music evokes the military, a distinctively masculine domain) and to the technical seriousness of the fourth movement (most likely a reference to the resolutely two- and three-part contrapuntal design of much of the movement). That “manliness” should in part derive from Schubert's evocation of the military world draws our attention to what was really at stake in this sexual category. As Linda Dowling, Alan Sinfield, and David Halperin have recently established, the term “manly,” when used prior to the full flowering of the concept of sexu- ality, had more to do with civic capacity than with sexual demeanor.” In essence, then, to dub an artwork “manly” was to give it a gender, to inter- pret the sexual category in larger cultural and social terms.”* By portraying the Sonata as “manly,” the critics meant to call attention to its ability to sustain (in however small a way) the common political and national good. In other words, in these instances the sexual category of “manliness” was aligned with a political system of meaning, not with one that concernedSex, Sexuality, and Schubert's Piano Music 227 individuality or personal identity. (And, it is important to add, the adjec- tive “manly” could configure individuals irrespective of their preference in sexual partners. Thus, even if we were mistakenly tempted to read these remarks for evidence of Schubert's “identity,” our reviewers’ perceptions of manly qualities in the Sonata do not in any way provide evidence on contemporary perceptions of sexual practices.) As the nineteenth century unfolded, the sense of the category changed sharply. “Manly,” together with its antonym “effeminate” and its near- antonym “feminine,” came increasingly to be employed in ways that helped conjoin sexuality to identity. A glance at the history of the terms “manly,” “feminine,” and “effeminate” in the reception of Schubert confirms this reading. For Schumann, the manliness of Schubert’s music came into ques- tion in only one specific relational instance. Taken on its own, Schubert’s music projected abundant masculinity: in his review of Schubert’s Grand Duo (the source of all the terms cited here), Schumann noted the “bold- ness” and “free-spirited” character of the piece. But measured against Beethoven, Schubert became, for Schumann, the feminine Other: Schubert is a girlish character compared to the other, far more loquacious, softer [“weicher,” also meaning “effeminate”] and broader, compared to the other a child who plays carefree under the giants. . .. To be sure, he brings in his power- ful passages, he also summons masses; for all that he comports himself always as, wife to husband, who orders, where the former pleads and persuades. But all this merely in comparison with Beethoven; compared to others, he is yet man enough; indeed, the boldest and most freethinking among the new musicians.” In other words, Schumann's understanding of masculine and feminine hardly differed from the politically tinged sense we noted in Schubert’s day. By dressing Schubert in girlish, wifely, effeminate garb, Schumann preserved the militaristic commanding role in the pantheon of German composers for Beethoven, the memory of whom Schumann and other critics culti- vated, as part of their project of fostering a nascent sense of German na- tional identity.2° During the second half of the nineteenth century (and continuing well into the twentieth century), ascriptions of feminine or effeminate charac- teristics to Schubert’s music began to be likened to the composer’s own psychical and physical make-up. David Gramit has fully documented how this process shaped Victorian constructions of Schubert." The “feminine” in Schubert’s music reflected feminine essences in the man. Hence Edward. Wilberforce could imply parallels between Schubert’s musical style and the purportedly “feminine organization” of his skull (which had been exam- ined when his remains were disinterred in 1863); hence George Grove could suggest a kindred relationship between Schubert’s “womanly” music and what Grove described as his shy, awkward, and girlish nature. It is no228 Jeffrey Kallberg coincidence that artistic production and personal identity should be linked in this manner at more or less the same time that a psychiatric model of sexuality began to emerge from the work of great nineteenth-century sex- ologists like Heinrich Kaan, Carl Westphal, and Richard von Krafft-Ebing. Can we talk about sexuality and Schubert’s piano music? I have tried to sug- gest that if our concern is with the meanings that this repertoire might have enjoyed during Schubert's lifetime, the answer is largely no. But if our concern is with how our own sexualities might be measured against Schubert's instru- mental music, then the answer is certainly yes. Sexuality as a cultural con- struct joined to notions of personal and group identity did not much figure into Schubert’s broader cultural context; to invoke it as a category of histori- cal analysis is thus to risk anachronism. On the other hand, a historically appropriate category does exist, one that figured prominently in the public sphere around Schubert, and its name is sex. By appealing to sex rather than sexuality, we effectively and properly separate the issue from concerns with Schubert’ life and with related ideas of subjectivity and focus instead on how listeners interpreted its relatively infrequent intersections with piano music. ‘That the sexual category performed a perhaps unexpected bit of cultural work in a piece like the Sonata in A Minor—aligning it with notions of nascent German national identity—usefully reminds us of the curious gaps in experi- ence that often still remain when we compare our experiences of this most familiar repertoire with those of Schubert’s contemporaries. Notes 1. The topic for this paper arose from an invitation to participate in an April 1995 symposium on Schubert’s piano music hosted by the Westfield Center and the Smithsonian Institution. 2. In formulating the matter this way, I want both to acknowledge my debts to recent scholarship, most important that of Michel Foucault and David Halperin, and to signal that some scholars would challenge the claim that I am making: the late John Boswell was perhaps the most prominent figure to argue for an essential congruence between older and newer sexual categories. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978); David M. Halperin, “One Hundred Years of Homosexuality,” in his One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (New York: Routledge, 1990), 15-40, 154-68; Robert Hurley, “How to Do the History of Male Homosexuality,” GLQ 6 (2000): 87-124; John Boswell, “Categories, Experience and Sexuality,” in Forms of Desire: Sexual Orientation and the Social Construc- tionist Controversy, ed. Edward Stein (New York: Routledge, 1990), 133-73. Ihave expressed some of the arguments in the following paragraphs in more condensed form in “Sex, Sexuality,” The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Mu- sicians, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 2001), 23:178-80.Sex, Sexuality, and Schubert's Piano Music 229 3. Robert Padgug, “Sexual Matters: On Conceptualizing Sexuality in History,” in Forms of Desire, ed. Edward Stein, 43-67. 4. For a discussion of the relevance of hermaphrodites to an understanding of sex and sexuality in the early nineteenth century, see my Chopin at the Boundaries: Sex, History, and Musical Genre (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 81. 5. On “individual” as a modern formulation, see Lynn Hunt, “Foucault’s Sub- ject in The History of Sexuality,” in Discourses of Sexuality: From Aristotle to AIDS, ed. Domna C. Stanton (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 84-85. I have benefitted greatly from Hunt’s critique of certain ahistorical gaps in Foucault's monumental project. 6. Randolph Trumbach has argued his position in several publications. In addi- tion to his Sex and the Gender Revolution, vol. 1: Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), see his “Sodomitical Subcultures, Sodomitical Roles, and the Gender Revolution of the Fighteenth Century: The Recent Historiography,” in ’Tis Nature’s Fault: Unau- thorized Sexuality during the Enlightenment, ed. Robert Purks Maccubbin (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 109-21; his “Gender and the Homo- sexual Role in Modern Western Culture,” in Homosexuality, Which Homosexual- ity?, ed. Dennis Altman (Amsterdam: An Dekker / Schorer, 1989), 149-69; his “London's Sapphists: From Three Sexes to Four Genders in the Making of Modern Culture,” in Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 112-41; and “Sex, Gender, and Sexual Identity in Modern Culture: Male Sodomy and Fe- male Prostitution in Enlightenment London,” in Forbidden History: The State, So- ciety, and the Regulation of Sexuality in Modern Europe, ed. John C. Fout (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 89-106. Davidson makes his case in his “Sex and the Emergence of Sexuality,” Critical Inquiry 14 (1987): 16-48. 7. This point is also made in two of the more interesting studies of the relation- ships between sexual categories and Schubert’s music: Susan McClary, “Construc- tions of Subjectivity in Schubert’s Music,” in Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, ed. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas (New York: Routledge, 1994), 205 and 228; and Lawrence Kramer, Franz Schubert: Sexu- ality, Subjectivity, Song (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 93-128. 8. Paul Derks, Die Schande der heiligen Paderastie: Homosexualitét und Offentlichkeit in der deutschen Literatur, 1750-1850 (Berlin: Verlag Rosa Winkel, 1990). Derks’s study actually dates from 1981 (see the author's statement on p. 17), which accounts for his failure to take into account the historiographical questions about the category of homosexuality that have been raised more recently by Halperin and Davidson. Nor does Derks mention Foucault, although the first volume of The History of Sexuality was translated into German in 1977. 9. On the homosocial nature of much of Schubert’s life, see David Gramit, ““The Passion for Friendship’: Music, Cultivation, and Identity in Schubert’s Circle,” in The Cambridge Companion to Schubert, ed. Christopher H. Gibbs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 56-71, and Gibbs, The Life of Schubert (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 134-35, 152, and 188. 10. Maynard Solomon, “Franz Schubert and the Peacocks of Benvenuto Cellini,” 19th-Century Music 12 (1989): 193-206; Maynard Solomon, “Schubert: Some230 Jeffrey Kallberg Consequences of Nostalgia,” 19th-Century Music 17 (1993): 34-46; Kristina Muxfeldt, “Political Crimes and Liberty, or Why Would Schubert Eat a Peacock,” 19th-Century Music 17 (1993): 47-64; and David Gramit, “Constructing a Victo- rian Schubert: Music, Biography, and Cultural Values,” 19th-Century Music 17 (1993): 65-78. 11. On Kleist and Iffland, see Derks, Die Schande der heiligen Paiderastie, 432- 33. One wonders if this aura of same-sex scandal had anything to do with the inter- est of members of Schubert’s circle in this play. See the references to Moritz von Schwind’s drawing of a scene from the play, to a performance of it, and to reading of it in Otto Erich Deutsch, The Schubert Reader: A Life of Franz Schubert in Letters and Documents, trans. Eric Blom (New York: W. W. Norton, 1947), 548, 578, 790, and 792. 12. Solomon, “Schubert: Some Consequences of Nostalgia,” 46. 13. But whatever these personal sexual practices might have been, itis also surely right to insist that Schubert showed a strong inclination to explore the artistic reso- nances of sexual activity between men. See Kristina Muxfeldt, “Schubert, Platen, and the Myth of Narcissus,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 49 (1996): 480-27; and Kramer, Franz Schubert, 101-2. 14, “Mir erscheinen seine Werke wie Kinder, deren Vater cin Weib oder deren Mutter ein Mann ware. Das letete mir bekannt gewordne Werk (‘Christus am Olberge’) kommt mir vor wie ein Unkeuschheit, deren Grund und Ziel ein ewiger Tod ist . . . Ich kenne musikalische Personen, die sich sonst bei Anhérung seiner Werke alarmiert, ja indigniert fanden und nun von einer Leidenschaft dafir ergriffen sind wie die Anhinger der griechischen Liebe.” Briefwechsel zwischen Goethe und Zelter, 1799-1832, ed. Max Hecker, 3 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1987), 1:352-53. Charles Rosen discusses these remarks by Zelter in his The Frontiers of Meaning: Three Informal Lectures on Music (New York: Hill & Wang, 1994), 69-71. 15. G. A. Macfarren, “Symphony in A Minor, of Dr. Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy,” The Musical World, 16 June 1842, 187. 16, “[Dlie vorliegende Sonate scheint ein solcher Erguss aus dem innersten Herzen zu sein.” Marx's review is printed in Stefan Kunze, ed., Ludwig van Beethoven: Die Werke im Spiegel seiner Zeit (Laaber: Laaber Verlag, 1987), 369. 17. “Die Musik schlieSt dem Menschen ein unbekanntes Reich auf, eine Welt, die nichts gemein hat mit der auSern Sinnenwelt, die ihn umgibt, und in der et alle bestimmten Gefihle zuriickla8t, um sich einer unaussprechlichen Schnsucht hinzugeben”; “Beethovens Instrumental-Musik,”in E. T. A. Hoffmann, Fantasiestiicke in Callot’s Manier; Werke 1814, ed. Hartmut Steinecke, Gerhard Allroggen, and Wulf Segebrecht, E. T. A. Hoffmann Saimtliche Werke (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1993), Bd. 2/1:52. “Music reveals to man an unknown realm, a world quite separate from the outer sensual world surrounding him, a world in which he leaves behind all precise feelings in order to embrace an inexpressible longing”; translation typographically modified from “E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings: Kreisleriana, The Poet and the Composer,” in Music Criticism, ed. David Charlton, trans. Martyn Clarke (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1989), 96. 18, "Eine Fantasie ist ein Tonstiick, worin der Componist den Fittigen scines Erfindungsgeistes eine ganz freye Schwungkraft erlauben, die seltsamsten FormenSex, Sexuality, and Schubert's Piano Music 231 zur méglichsten Einheit verbinden, und so ein Bild vor unsere Seele stellen kann, das durch Lebendigkeit der Farbe, Gestalt und Gruppirung, durch Mannigfaltigkeit der zu einem schonen Ganzen vereinten Mittel unser Empfindungsvermogen auf eine hochst interessante Art in Anspruch nimmt”; Wiener Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 30 April 1823, as reproduced in Franz Schubert: Dokumente, 1817-1830, ed. Till Gerrit Waidelich (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1993), 157-58. I have slightly modified the translation of this document found in Deutsch, The Schubert Reader, 277-78. 19. “Ein solches Tonstiick ist aus diesem Grunde wohl am meisten geeignet, die Gefiihle, welche dem Tonsetzer bey der Erschaffung desselben beseelten, getreu in sich aufzunehmen und wiederzugeben, ja es kann fiiglich als ein Spiegel seiner Tiefe angesehen werden. Da nun ein Tonsetzer, wie Herr Schubert, der schon friiher in seinen allgemein geschatzten Liedercompositionen ein tiefes Gemiith verrieth, mit einem solchen Seelengemahlde auftritt, kann es der musikalischen Welt nicht anders als erfreulich seyn”; Waidlich, ed., Franz Schubert: Dokumente, 158. (I have again modified the translation found in Deutsch, The Schubert Reader, 277-78.) 20, Susan J. Wolfson, “A Lesson in Romanticism: Gendering the Soul,” in Les- sons of Romanticism: A Critical Companion, ed. Thomas Pfau and Robert F. Gleckner (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), 349-75. 21, Otto Erich Deutsch, ed., Schubert: Die Dokumente seines Lebens (Kassel: Barenreiter, 1964), 326. 22. Deutsch, The Schubert Reader, 476. 23. Gibbs, The Life of Schubert, 95. 24, “Unverwiistlich” means neither “unimpaired” nor “irreducibly”; it is an adjective properly translated as “irrepressible,” “inexhaustible,” “indestructible,” “durable,” or “inveterate.” And “Affektionen” means something more akin to “dis- positions,” “penchants,” or “inclinations,” rather than “passions.” On “unverwiistlich,” see Langenscheidt’s Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English and German Languages, Part Il: German-English, ed. Otto Springer, 2 vols. (Berlin: Langenscheidt, 1975; Sth ed., 1990), 2:1639; and Keith Spalding, An Historical Dictionary of German Figurative Usage, Fascicle 55 (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1995), 2585-86, s.v. “verwiisten.” On “Affektionen,” see Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Worterbuch, rev. ed. (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1983), 1:cols. 1572-7. and Hans Schulz and Otto Basler, Deutsches Fremdworterbuch, 2nd ed. (Berlin: W. De Gruyter, 1995), 1:174-77. 25. “Was wiirde im angeregten Gemiithen nach diesem Wechsel der Empfindungen am natiirlichsten folgen? Doch wohl: eine, gleichsam verallgemeinerte, gehobene Stimmung iiberhaupt, nicht heftig, aber sehr lebhaft, nicht triibe, aber auch nicht leicht und lustig—eine kraftige, mannlich-heitere Stimmung, gemischt aus Ernst zum grdsseren, und aus Scherz zum kleineren Theile. Eben das ist der Ausdruck des angen, in technischer Behandlung sehr zusammengehaltenen Finale—Allegro vivace, A moll; Zweyvierteltakt.” Leipziger Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 1 March 1826, as reproduced in Franz Schubert: Dokumente, 270-72. Again, I have some- what modified the translation of this review found in Deutsch, The Schubert Reader, $12-15. 26. “So wie Hr. Schubert sich in seinen Liedern als tiichtiger Kenner der Harmonie zeigt, und seine Melodien durch eine schéne Folie der Accorde zu wiirzen versteht, so zeigt er sich hier in einer fast martialischen Stimmung, in welcher ein232 Jeffrey Kallberg wohlgewihlter Harmonienwechsel das marschartige Mittelthema, in vielfaltigen Verinderungen begleitet. Das moderate Tempo pat sehr gut fiir den Gang der Iden, und der Tonsetzer bleibt consequent in dem einmal aufgefaBten mannlichen Charakter”; Wiener Zeitschrift fiir Kunst, Literatur, Theater und Mode, 14 August 1828, as reproduced in Franz Schubert: Dokumente, 428. English translation from Deutsch, The Schubert Reader, 799, modified slightly. 27. Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), 5-12; Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Ef- feminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 25-51; David Halperin, “How to Do the History of Male Homosexu- ality,” 92-94. The arguments of these authors actually concern the term “effemi- nate,” to which “manly” was ordinarily posed as the antonym. The sobriquet “ef- feminate” could be applied to men who engaged in sex with other men and also to ‘men who overindulged their sexual passion for women. Both behaviors could equally debilitate the subject and render him unfit to serve a larger civic good. On the relationship between civil society and sexual behavior in Germany in the period just before Schubert, see Isabel V. Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700-1815 (Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 1996), 229-56. 28. On the relationship between sex and gender, see my article “Gender,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., ed. Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (London: Macmillan, 2001), 9:645-47. 29, “Schubert ist ein Madchencharakter, an jenen gehalten, bei weitem geschwatziger, weicher und breiter; gegen jenen ein Kind, das sorglos unter den Riesen spielt. . .. Zwar bringt auch er seine Kraftstellen, bietet auch er Massen auf; doch verhalt er sich immer wie Weib zum Mann, der befiehlt, wo jenes bittet und iiberredet. Dies alles aber nur in Vergleich zu Beethoven; gegen andere ist er noch Mann genug, ja der kishnste und freigeistigste der neueren Musiker”; Newe Zeitschrift fitr Musik, 1838, as transmitted in Robert Schumann, Gesammelte Schriften iiber Musike und Musiker, ed. Martin Kreisig, Sth ed. (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Hartel, 1914), 1:330. Ihave modified the English translation found in Robert Schumann, On Music and Musicians, ed. Konrad Wolff, trans. Paul Rosenfeld (New York: Norton, 1969), 117. One wonders if Nikolaus Lenau felt the influence of Schumann's critique when he wrote to Maximilian Lowenthal on 19 November 1839 (the anniversary of Schubert’s death): “Schubert's compositions are wearing thin. There is a certain coquetry, an unmanly effeminacy about them.” (“Schuberts Kompositionen niitzen sich ab. Es ist eine gewisse Koketterie, eine unmannliche Weichlichkeit in ihnen”; Otto Erich Deutsch, ed., Schubert: Die Erinnerungen seiner Freunde (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Hartel, 1957; reprint, Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Hartel, 1983], 284.) 30. On this project, see Sanna Pederson, “On the Task of the Music Historian: The Myth of the Symphony after Beethoven,” repercussions 2/2 (Fall 1993): 5-30. See also her “Beethoven and Masculinity,” in Beethoven and His World, ed. Scott Burnham and Michael P. Steinberg (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 313-31. What needs also to be considered with respect to Schumann's pairing of Schubert against Beethoven is the manner in which the configuration of the relationship be- tween these two composers changed after their deaths. That is, during Schubert's life, comparisons between the two composers—a relatively rare occurrence—gener- ally placed them on equal footing (see, for example, the 1826 review of the A-Sex, Sexuality, and Schubert's Piano Music 233 Minor Sonata cited above). After Schubert’s death, the comparisons came more frequently and worked more often to Schubert’s disadvantage (a good source is the collection of reviews in Otto Brusatti, Schubert im Wiener Vormiirz: Dokumente 1829-1848 |Graz: Akadem. Druck u. Verlagsanst., 1978]). 31. Gramit, “Constructing a Victorian Schubert,” 71-73. 32. For one such exploration, see Philip Brett, “Piano Four-Hands: Schubert and the Performance of Gay Male Desire,” 19-Century Music 21 (1997): 149-76.