Music and Sexuality: On the Steblin/Solomon Debate

Author(s): Susan McClary

Source: 19th-Century Music, Vol. 17, No. 1, Schubert: Music, Sexuality, Culture (Summer,
1993), pp. 83-88
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/746783 .
Accessed: 15/10/2011 14:00
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to 19thCentury Music.

http://www.jstor.org

Music and Sexuality: On the Steblin/Solomon Debate

SUSAN MCCLARY

When Maynard Solomon presented his "Franz

Schubert and the Peacocks of Benvenuto
Cellini" at the American Musicological Society meeting in 1988, the event seemed to announce a new openness in musicology. Before
that time, most biographerseither drew a veil
of secrecy around the homoerotic aspects of a
(male) composer's life or else sought to prove
that he was heterosexual-a feat that often required extensive rummaging for possible girlfriends.Some exceptions existed: Tchaikovsky's
homosexuality had been established beyond
question; Peter Ostwald's biography of
Schumann had dealt straightforwardlywith the
homoerotic episodes in Schumann's life; Philip
Brett (afterresistance from various editors) had
written about Britten's music in ways that took

19th-Century Music XVII/1 (Summer 1993). o by The Regents of the University of California.

his sexuality into account;' and the New Grove

Dictionary no longer flinched from reporting
that certain Renaissance composers had lost
their positions owing to charges of pederasty.
Still, an AMS paper focusing on homosexuality by a prominent musicologist and concerning a composer of Schubert'sstature counted as
a major breakthroughfor those of us who had
been following the emergence of researchabout
homosexuality in other disciplines. For during
the relatively tolerant 1970s and 80s, a growing
number of scholars in the humanities and social sciences had begun to trace the histories of
gay men and lesbians in the West, to study how
other societies categorize a rangeof sexual prac'Peter Ostwald, Schumann: The Inner Voices of a Musical
Genius (Boston, 1985); Philip Brett, Benjamin Britten: Peter Grimes (Cambridge, 1983), and "An Interview with
Philip Brett," in Lawrence Mass, Homosexuality as Behavior and Identity: Dialogues of the Sexual Revolution,
vol. II (New York, 1990), pp. 36-54.

83

19TH

CENTURY
MUSIC

tices, and to examine the ways same-sex eroticism has informed cultural artifacts from various times and places.2 After Solomon's article
appeared in this journal in 1989, a few more
musicologists ventured into this long-forbidden terrain. The first panel on homosexuality
occurredat the 1990 AMS meeting, and several
paperson homosexuality (femaleand male) were
delivered at the Feminist Theory and Music
conference in Minneapolis in 1991. Articles
explicitly concerned with homosexuality have
now appearedin both the Journalof the American Musicological Society (Michael Hicks on
Henry Cowell) and Musical Quarterly (Clifford
Hindley on Britten).3And an entire collection,
Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian
Musicology, is to appearin 1993.4
But the climate of social and intellectual
tolerance that made this kind of work seem
viable began growing chilly by the late 80s,
as controversies broke out over Robert
Mapplethorpe'swork and over a cluster of performance artists whose grants had been withdrawnby the National Endowment for the Arts.
In the 1992 elections, three states voted on
whether or not to restrict the civil rights of gay
and lesbian citizens (the measure passed in
Colorado). And the first weeks of the Clinton
presidency have been clouded by bitter debate
over the participation of gays and lesbians in
the military.
These reversals have not left musicology untouched, and Schubert is clearly the composer
2Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality is the pioneering
work in this area, although he completed only the first
three volumes before his death. See also Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay & Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Bauml

Duberman,MarthaVicinus, and GeorgeChauncey,Jr.(New

York, 1989); David Greenberg, The Construction of Ho-

mosexuality (Chicago, 1988); JonathanDollimore, Sexual

Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford, 1991); Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories,

ed. Diana Fuss (New York, 1991).

3Michael Hicks, "The Imprisonment of Henry Cowell,"
Journal of the American Musicological Society 44 (1991),

92-119; and Clifford Hindley, "Homosexual Self-affirmation and Self-oppressionin Two Britten Operas,"Musical
Quarterly 76 (1992), 143-68.
4Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicol-

ogy, ed. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary Thomas

(New York, forthcoming).Essays on gay and lesbian issues
appearalso in the initial issue of the new journalrepercussions and in Musicology and Difference, ed. Ruth Solie

(Berkeleyand Los Angeles, forthcoming).

84

most hotly contested. A session on Schubertat

the 1991 AMS meeting erupted into a brouhaha over the composer's sexuality. At the annual 92nd Street Y Schubertiade in February
1992, Solomon's article came under repeated
attack (one speaker referredto him as a "pornographer").I am myself, of course, implicated
in this debate: at the same event, my talk linking Schubert's sexuality and his music sparked
a heated discussion and was greeted with three
scathing reviews in the New YorkTimes.5And
a recent article by Andreas Mayer in Schubert
durch die Brille accused Solomon of following
the dictates of P.C. (i.e., political correctness)
orthodoxy, which he claims now controls the
American academy.6
It is within this context that Rita Steblin's
article appears.Steblin does not addressdirectly
the propriety of doing scholarship concerning
homosexuality; her purpose is to challenge the
particular arguments Solomon put forward in
his article. This seems entirely appropriate:regardless of our position with respect to these
debates, I think we can agree that the evidence
brought forth for our cases should be as complete and accurate as possible. And the publication of her article gives Solomon the public
forum he needs for responding to objections
that have been circulating informally-yet no
less corrosively-in the last two years.
I will leave it to the readers to weigh the
merits of the two cases. Yet whether one agrees
with her or not, Steblin's article forces us to
reflect once again on why, how, and even if
musicology should address topics connected
with homosexuality. My commentary focuses
on this set of questions.
There appear to be two central issues in the
Schubertdebate:biographyand music criticism,
which may or may not be related to each other.
First, biography. Ever since composer biogra'Edward Rothstein, "Was Schubert Gay? If He Was, So
What?"New YorkTimes, 4 February1992; idem, "'AndIf
You Play "Bolero" Backward . . .'," New York Times, 16

February1992; and BernardHolland, "Dr. Freud,Can Tea

Really Just Be Tea?"New YorkTimes, 17 February1992.
6AndreasMayer, "Der Psychoanalytische Schubert: Eine
kleine Geschichte der Deutungskonkurrenzen in der
Schubert-Biographikdargestellt am Beispiel des Textes
'Mein Traum'," Schubert durch die Brille 9 (1992), 7-31.

phies began to proliferate in the nineteenth

century, these books have most often resembled
hagiographies.The less flattering aspects of the
composer's life are airbrushedout, leaving only
an ideal image that seems compatible with the
preferredreception of the music itself. Recently,
however, the genre of composer biographies
has become far more serious, and Solomon is
one of those responsible for the change.7 But
these new studies inevitably raise the question
of what we want to know about composers. For
there is no objective way of presenting a life
story: a biographernecessarily selects from the
evidence at hand what is to be emphasized as
central to the understandingof the artist, what
is to be excluded as irrelevant.
Do we really need to know about a
composer's sex life? Does this kind of knowledge matter? At first glance, it may seem that
earlier generations avoided dealing with the
sexual habits of the composers they studied.
Yet the question of sexuality has long been a
virtual obsession with musicologists-thus the
energy devoted to documenting heterosexual
credentials for composers.8 The principal difference is that scholars such as Solomon accept
the possibility that composers they admire had
complex psychological and sexual lives and that
these aspects of their personalities might be
relevant to the work they produced. Inasmuch
as questions concerning sexuality have long
been a concern of musicologists, then, it is
important to set the record straight (as it were)
by allowing homosexuality to be discussed
when appropriate. Otherwise we perpetuate
smoke screens.
Moreover, it is crucial-especially in this
time of backlash-that academic disciplines
start to acknowledge our debt to cultural figures
who were homosexual. In her Epistemology of
the Closet, literary theorist Eve Sedgwick asks:
"Has there ever been a gay Socrates?Has there
ever been a gay Shakespeare? Has there ever
7Maynard Solomon, Beethoven (New York, 1977); idem,
"Charles Ives: Some Questions of Veracity," Journal of the
American Musicological Society 40 (1987), 443-70. His
full-length study of Mozart is in progress.
8See, for instance, Gary Thomas's examination of Handel
scholarship in "'Was George Frederick Handel Gay?': On
Closet Questions and Cultural Politics," in Queering the
Pitch.

been a gay Proust?"Her reply: "[N]ot only have

there been a gay Socrates, Shakespeare, and
Proust but . ..

their names are Socrates,

Shakespeare, Proust."' On one level, her strategy is an impish joke, playing as it does on the
old reactionary taunt that demands evidence of
a black Mozart or a female Beethoven, thus
implying the essential inferiority of whatever
category of person is in question. But on another level, she is most serious as she reminds
us of the prominence of homosexuals in cultural history: not only have they always been
there, but they often occupy central positions
within the pantheon. If such information were
common knowledge, the category "homosexual" might lose some of the pejorative connotations now associated with it.
No one is suggesting that musicology relax
its standards, that Schubert be labeled as gay
simply because a minority group may wish to
lay claim to him (which is not, in any case, the
motivation of any of the work cited above). But
neither should the discipline grasp at flimsy
evidence for the sake of assuring itself that all
prominent composers were straight. While no
one is advocating bad scholarship operating in
accordance with "special interest groups," the
history of the discipline-with its virtual silence concerning gay issues-would seem to
argue that political pressureshave come principally from the mainstream.
Finally, as Sedgwick demonstrates in Epistemology of the Closet, sexuality has been one of
the most decisive features of cultural activity
in the West for the last one hundred years. She
arguescompellingly that twentieth-century culture cannot be studied properlywithout taking
sexual orientation into account, for many of
the debates that spawned Modernism were reactions to what was perceived as the increasing
homosexual presence in the arts.1' While she

9Eve Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley and

Los Angeles, 1990), p. 52.
1'For other recent work linking Modernism with masculine anxieties and fears of femininity, see Andreas Huyssen,
"Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism's Other," in his
After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism
1986), pp. 44-62; Peter
(Bloomington,
Middleton, The Inward Gaze: Masculinity and Subjectivity in Modern Culture (New York, 1992).

85

SUSAN
MCCLARY
Music and
Sexuality

19TH

CENTURY
MUSIC

does not discuss it specifically, her points have

obvious resonances with recent music history
as well."
Nor is sexual orientation at issue only in
twentieth-century culture. RichardLepperthas
revealed how eighteenth-century English males
were discouraged from participating in music
because it was associated with effeminacy; Richard Dellamora has written on nineteenthcentury German and English "Dorianism"-a
widespread set of practices in academic and
artistic circles that involved explicitly
homoerotic mentoring relationships patterned
after the Greeks; Wayne Koestenbaum and
Mitchell Morris have started to explore the
ways opera has been read by the gay men ("opera queens") who have long made up a large
part of its audiences; and the more we know
about seventeenth-century Venetian music
drama the more it demands that we take seriously its flagrant gender-bending.'2As musicology begins to break away from the ideology
of music's autonomy, we are likely to encounter more and more evidence of how its production and reception were shaped by matters connected with sexuality. We stand to learn a great
deal about music in its social contexts if we
take such information into account; indeed, we
will blind ourselves to crucial issues if we do
not.
But what does any of this have to do with the
music itself? Let me emphasize at the outset
that there is no necessary connection between
any particular aspect of a composer's life and
the kind of music that individual produces.

"See, for instance, Solomon, "Charles Ives"; and Fred Maus,

"Masculine Discourse in Music Theory," Perspectives of
New Music (forthcoming).
12SeeRichard Leppert, Music and Image: Domesticity, Ideology and Socio-cultural Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1988); Richard Dellamora's study
of Dorianism (of which the most famous vestige is Oscar
Wilde's Dorian Gray) is in his Apocalyptic Overtures (New
Brunswick, forthcoming); Wayne Koestenbaum, The
Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery
of Desire (New York, 1993); Mitchell Morris, "Reading as
an Opera Queen," in Musicology and Difference. On the
relevance of recent work on gender-bending in Elizabethan drama to Venetian opera, see my review of The Rise
of a Genre: Seventeenth-Century Opera in Venice, by Ellen
Rosand, in Historical Performance 4 (1991), 109-17.

86

Thus even if we were to find unequivocal evidence that all Schubert's sexual encounters involved men, that discovery in itself would not
tell us how to interprethis music. It would still
be quite conceivable (some would say certain)
that his sexual orientation was irrelevant to his
compositional practices. And even if we found
explicit verification that Schubert wanted to
make his sexuality relevant to his music, we
would not know in advance how that relevance
might be manifested. There is, in other words,
no essentialist link between sexual preference
(or gender, class, or ethnic identity, for that
matter) and modes of cultural expression.
Yet in the unlikely event that someone were
to prove that Schubert's partners were all
women, the question of his sexuality would
not go away, for it has long been implicit in the
reception of his music. Although today we like
to think of Schubert'smusic as being concerned
primarily with purely musical issues, recent
research in literary studies, aesthetics, and musicology has started to reveal that nineteenthcentury culture focused much of its energy on
constructing and critiquing various models of
masculine subjectivity.13As David Gramit's article suggests, Schubert's compositions were
not only assessed in those terms, but his particular solutions perplexed many of his listeners.14Beginning with Schumann's essay on the
Great C-MajorSymphony, a long line of critics
have discerned in Schubert'smusic an unusual
sensibility that many of them labeled as "feminine" or "womanly," usually in explicit contrast with a Beethovenian model. As Sir George
Grove put it:

Anotherequallytrue sayingof Schumannis that,

comparedwith Beethoven,Schubertis as a woman
to a man. Forit must be confessedthat one's atti13See Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford, 1990); Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/
1900, trans. Michael Metteer (Stanford, 1990); Franco
Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in
European Culture (London, 1987); and Anne K. Mellor,
Romanticism and Gender (New York, 1993).
14David E. Gramit, "Constructing a Victorian Schubert:
Music, Biography, and Cultural Values," this issue, 65-78.

See also JeffreyKallberg,"The Harmony of the Tea Table:

Gender and Ideology in the Piano Nocturne," Representations 39 (1992), 102-33, for a discussion of how Chopin
similarly was branded as "feminine."

tude towards him is almost always that of sympathy, attraction, and love, rarely that of embarrassment or fear. Here and there only ... does he compel
his listeners with an irresistible power; and yet how
different is this compulsion from the strong, fierce,
merciless coercion, with which Beethoven forcesyou
along, and bows and bends you to his will.15
Most musicologists and theorists have learned
to dismiss this kind of nineteenth-century critical prose as inexplicably bizarre, since it seems
not to address the music at all. Yet we might
learn a great deal if we paid attention to such
comments, instead of rejecting them out of
hand. While we do not have to accept them
unconditionally, they can give us access to what
was at issue in cultural politics during that
time.
For the idiosyncrasies Grove and others point
to in Schubert's music are crucial, even though
we need not identify them as "womanly." We
would do better to regard them as presenting a
version of masculinity that challenges the universality of the rather more aggressive versions
being adopted around that time as normative.
Because writers-then
and now-have
relied
heavily on a binary opposition between masculine and feminine, Schubert has often been
coded as "effeminate." But recent scholarship
permits us to see how culture has privileged
certain models and representations of masculinity, and it has become easier to recognize
and value alternatives.16 Schubert's music differs not because he was incapable of producing
heroic narratives along the lines Beethoven had
charted, but rather because he evidently wanted
to explore other possibilities-even
though this
that
he
rework
required
virtually every parameter of his inherited musical language.17

"'Grove, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn (London, 1951),

p. 237. The essays are reprinted from the first edition of

the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1882).

16Forrecent theories of masculine subjectivities, see Victor J. Seidler, Rediscovering Masculinity: Reason, Language

and Sexuality (New York, 1989); Jessica Benjamin, The

Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis,

Feminism, and the Prob-

Such strategies by themselves do not indicate that Schubert was homosexual. We cannot, in other words, discern Schubert's sexuality merely by listening: it is possible to imagine women of whatever orientation or heterosexual men devising similar strategies. Yet if
homosexuality cannot by itself account for
those aspects of Schubert's music, there still
remains the possibility that the two are linked.
This is especially so if we accept Solomon's
argument that Schubert's sexuality was not a
marginal aspect of his life, but that it constituted an important factor in his social networking. If we know through external sources
that he was self-identified as homosexual, then
several lines of inquiry open up.
For as the work produced in the context of
later subcultures shows, artists do sometimes
choose to make differences related to factors
such as sexuality (or gender, ethnicity, or class)
in what they create. Clearly during periods when
art focused on issues other than the artist's
subjective feelings or when subcultural connections are lacking, it is pointless to look for
correlations. Thus it is unlikely that the works
of, say, Renaissance
composer Nicholas
Gombert reflect his sexual inclinations.
But Schubert was writing at a time when the
articulation of what was taken to be the artist's
interiority was precisely what was valued, and
his particular experiences of self and intimacies might well be understood as factors that
influenced the formal procedures he designed.
Moreover, Schubert was part of a community
that provided much of the support for his work,
that supplied a sympathetic context within
which he was free to explore his unusual versions of subjectivity. From the standpoint of
criticism, Solomon's reading of Schubert's circle
as a subcultural formation is even more important than his arguments concerning Schubert's
specifically sexual activities, for it allows us to
locate his musical experiments within a public
(or semipublic) discursive framework.
We may never know with certainty about
Schubert's sexuality. Yet we do know that

lem of Domination (New York, 1988); Kaja Silverman,

Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York, 1992); and

Middleton, The Inward Gaze.
17For an interpretation of Schubert's music along these

lines, see my "Constructionsof Subjectivity in Schubert's

Music," in Queering the Pitch. See also LawrenceKramer,

"The Schubert Lied: Romantic Form and Romantic Consciousness," in Schubert: Critical and Analytical Studies,

ed. WalterFrisch (Lincoln,Neb., 1986),pp. 200-36.

87

SUSAN
MCCLARY
Music and
Sexuality

19TH
CENTURY

MUSIC

Schubert-for whatever reason-was producing constructions of masculine subjectivity that

differed markedly from many of those that surrounded him. Some have argued that the project
of interrogating these aspects of Schubert's
music ought to be delayed until the more "normative" parts of the repertory have been accounted for. But while we need to know much
more about images of gender and narratives of
desire within the whole repertory, it makes
sense to start with Schubert, whose music has
been heard by so many as making some important difference with respect to sensibility.'8 By
18Wehave to be careful, however, not to continue positioning Beethoven as "straight"in opposition to Schubert,
for Beethoven was scarcely a champion of heterosexuality,
even if he did succeed in constructing what has been accepted as an ideal of masculinity in music. As Solomon's
biography makes clear, this man was highly conflicted
with respect to his sexuality: he never managed to sustain
an intimate relationship, and his inclinations were decidedly homosocial-sometimes expressly homoerotic. What
is at issue is not Schubert's deviance from a "straight"
norm, but rather his particularconstructions of subjectivity, especially as they contrast with many of those posed
by his peers.

88

paying attention to Schubert's reception history, we can learn a great deal about how music has contributed to debates over gender, desire, and pleasure. Because we have a history of
critics fretting about Schubert's masculinity and
his music, his example offers us rare insight
into what participants in nineteenth-century
culture thought was at stake in "absolute music."
Put simply, studying Schubert from this perspective can help us unlock the entire repertory. And reading his music-in all its detailfrom this vantage point offers a valuable alternative to the strictly formalist accounts that
have dominated the field in recent decades. If
we permit ourselves to study how his life and
works relate to the central cultural issues of
his day, we might discover that Schubert was
even more innovative and visionary
than we had previously thought.19

19Mythanks to Philip Brett and Robert Walser for their

valuable suggestions concerning earlierdraftsof this statement.