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's music. 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
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. 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).
University of Rochester Press 343 pages PDF
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