How Franz Schubert and his compositions were viewed in
nineteenth-century European criticism, literature, and the visual arts,
from Schumann to George Eliot to Whistler.
In Schubert in the European Imagination, Volume 1: The Romantic and
Victorian Eras, Scott Messing 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. 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.
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'smusic. The figures discussed include Musset,
Sand, Nerval, Maupassant, George Eliot, Henry James, Beardsley,
Whistler, Storm, Fontane, and Heinrich and Thomas Mann.
Over time, Schubert's stature became inextricably entwinedwith 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.
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.
Scott Messing is Charles A. Dana Professor of Music at Alma College, and
author of Neoclassicism in Music (University of Rochester Press, 1996).
