MUSIC VIEW; The Dark Side of Schubert (original) (raw)
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MUSIC VIEW
- Aug. 27, 1989
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August 27, 1989
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Section 2, Page
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Many people who love music feel it is not only vulgar but pointless to pry into the lives of the great composers. Who cares if Wagner was a deadbeat, that Mozart used foul language, that Beethoven tried to sell scores to different publishers simultaneously, that Chopin loved a woman who dressed like a man and smoked cigars? The music they left us is all that counts. If it were to be discovered tomorrow that Rossini liked to tie up cats and pull out their whiskers one by one, would the reputation of ''The Barber of Seville'' be much affected? No. Genuine art seeks to shed itself of its creator, ideally in time achieving anonymity of the sort enjoyed by the authors of the ''Iliad'' or the Egyptian ''Book of the Dead.''
That is the view espoused brilliantly by E. M. Forster (in his essay ''Anonymity'') and implicitly by art-for-art's-sake estheticians like Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde. Art is an insoluble enigma, an unsolicited gift of the gods mysteriously funneled through its nominal author. Stravinsky expressed that Platonic ideal well when he said, ''I am the vessel through which 'Le Sacre' passed.''
Such also is the comfortable position that most musical biographers were able to take not long ago. The chronological details and broad outlines of a composer's life were laid out, insofar as they could be determined, but snooping around in the psyche was outside the scholarly pale.
When this attitude began to change is not clear - perhaps it might be dated symbolically from Mahler's one-session analysis by Freud. But no longer does it seem reasonable that a newish biography of Schubert should tiptoe around the probability that the composer was an enthusiastic homosexual or that his sexuality could have had something to do with his feverishly prolific output, his drastic swings of mood and his tragic death of syphilis at age 31. Yet Charles Osborne's ''Schubert and His Vienna,'' published only three years ago by Knopf, all but ignores the sex issue and even spends a good deal of space dismissing as nasty fictions contemporary accounts of Schubert's heavy drinking. The story of his supposed infatuations with several women is taken at face value, despite evidence that his only intimate friends were male.
Now, however, psychobiography has its foot in the door and is demanding entry. One of the genre's leading practitioners is Maynard Solomon, the scholar who solved, to the satisfaction of many musicologists, the enigma of ''Beethoven's Beloved'' and subsequently published an authoritative biography of that composer. A while back, he upset some American music scholars by documenting instances in which Charles Ives apparently postdated and otherwise altered his scores to make them seem more prophetic of modern music's directions. Lately, Mr. Solomon has been turning his attention to Schubert, with results that are likely to distress pious Schubertians, both in and out of the scholarly community.
Characteristically, his arguments interleave exhaustive historical research with brave but well-founded conjectures about Schubert's inner life. A crucial document for him is the composer's famous account of a dream in which he rejects his father's invitation to a garden of (presumably heterosexual) pleasures in favor of going his own way. Most biographies describe the dream but merely call it a puzzling allegory whose meaning cannot now be known. Building on the psychoanalytic clues he detected in the dream, however, Mr. Solomon presented even more startling findings to the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society. Now they have appeared under the title ''Franz Schubert and the Peacocks of Benvenuto Cellini'' in the Spring 1989 issue of 19th Century Music, which probably has not heard the last of the matter. Controversy seems to follow Mr. Solomon like a lost puppy. Any close reader of Schubertiana must already have suspected that the composer had a secret life that kept him outside the bounds of bourgeois society. For much of his career he was intimately associated with a circle of artists in which homosexuality was, if not the norm, at any rate not an exception. His dearest friend, with whom he lived for several long periods until shortly before his death in 1828, was the homosexual and sometime female impersonator Franz von Schober. A brilliant talker and magnetic person who decorated his rooms in Persian style and held court as an Oriental prince, Schober enjoyed expounding on esthetics and philosophy for a devoted circle of artists and dilettantes. A clearly infatuated Schubert sent him mash notes that seem mawkish even in the context of the 19th century's flowery, sentimental prose style. As described by some of his friends, Schober was a cult leader who led the young composer into depravity, though Mr. Solomon believes it more likely that Schubert's inclinations were already firmly in place when he encountered this seductive personality.
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