SCHUBERT DIED in November 1828, long before his final resting place, the Viennese cemetery known as Zentralfriedhof, was opened in 1874. At first, he was buried in the local cemetery of Währing, near the grave of Beethoven, whom he had idolized. In 1888, the remains of both composers were transferred to the Zentralfriedhof, an occasion marked by festivities that included thousands of amateur choral singers.
In the summer of 2003, anticipating a pilgrimage to the cemetery for the first time, my expectations were at a high pitch—the Zentralfriedhof is considered the “Père Lachaise of Vienna”—but the Schubert monument proved a bit of a disappointment. The architect had opted for a drearily conventional Greco-Roman style, one modified by late 19th-century German romanticism. It’s a tall slab of white marble surmounted by an ornate triangular pediment and flanked by two graceful, though slightly effete, Ionic columns. Winged cherubs flutter at the bases. The relief sculpture in the slab depicts one of the Muses holding a lyre and crowning a bust of Schubert with a laurel wreath. One reference mentions “the delicate images in stone, reflective of Schubert’s sense for beautiful melody.” But the whole thing, as sincere as it was, struck me as an example the Viennese flirtation with kitsch.
As I stood there, listening to Schubert waltzes on my Walkman, memories of my long history with the composer filled my head: my sixth-grade music teacher playing the “Marche Militaire”; a few years later, discovering my mother’s scratchy 78 recordings of the Unfinished Symphony and the Rosamunde ballet music; sophomore year in high school when I played the fourth French horn part in the great C Major Symphony; taking voice lessons in college, frustrated that I couldn’t recreate the beautiful sounds I heard on Fischer-Dieskau recordings of Schubert. Frustrated, too, because I was in love with my voice teacher’s accompanist. He was a thin man with effeminate mannerisms—delicate, pliant wrists, a studied toss of the head, an overall swish to the way he moved. Actually, I wasn’t in love with him as much as I just wanted him to notice me, to look at me (his head was always in the score!), to let me know that he knew I was a gay man, too. Except for a love affair the previous summer, I had not come out to a soul. It was the late 60’s.
Over the years, without my realizing it at first, Schubert became my hero. After college, I discovered his other symphonies, then the chamber music—the glorious F major octet and the late, haunting string quartets—the masses, the men’s choruses, the piano sonatas. And the songs, hundreds of songs, many of them small masterpieces. (Brahms himself called one of them “the loveliest song ever written.”) The sheer volume of his music is staggering—close to a thousand compositions in all, and each one a delight, a surprise, an astonishing journey into colors and textures, ideas and moods that I have found in no other composer.
I became fascinated with other aspects of Schubert’s life, too: his painful battle with syphilis; his bouts of despondency; his death at age 31. I admired the courage and good cheer with which he faced all this sorrow. And, as a gay man, I wondered about his sexuality. Whom did he love?—this charming young man with his coterie of male friends, “playing and singing as if they were one,” as one of Schubert’s biographers has put it. As far as we know, Schubert courted only one woman, Therese Grob, a childhood neighbor and the soprano soloist in his first Mass. “She was not exactly pretty,” Schubert once recollected to his friend Anselm Hüttenbrenner, “and her face had pockmarks; but she had a heart, a heart of gold.” Schubert asserted that for three years Terese “hoped I would marry her; but I could not find a position which would have provided for us both.” Little is known about the actual nature of their relationship, which ended in 1816, when Schubert was nineteen. In his diary entry of September 8, 1816, the composer noted, “To a free man matrimony is a terrifying thought in these days; he exchanges [that freedom]either for melancholy or for crude sensuality.”
With that, Schubert seems to have given up the courtship of women. Hüttenbrenner observed that Schubert was “cold and unforthcoming toward the fair sex at parties,” and indeed he seemed to have “a dominating aversion for the daughters of Eve.” Moreover, while there exist many affectionate letters between Schubert and his male friends, not a single such letter to a woman has survived. Whether or not Schubert had other lady loves, what is certain is that he was hardly celibate. The memoirs left by Schubert’s friends strongly suggest that the composer was not only sexually promiscuous (he contracted syphilis around 1822) but, as musicologist Maynard Solomon puts it, “his promiscuity was of an unorthodox character.” Prostitution, rampant in Schubert’s Vienna, is the standard understanding of what was behind this alleged promiscuity. But some scholars have looked elsewhere. In a famous and controversial essay, “Franz Schubert and the Peacocks of Benvenuto Cellini,” Solomon concluded, “That the young men of the Schubert circle loved each other seems amply clear.” He went on to say that it is “reasonably probable that their primary sexual orientation was a homosexual one. By finding sexual release with anonymous partners in Vienna’s Halbwelt they apparently were able to maintain idealized passionate friendships with each other.”
What might Vienna’s homosexual Halbwelt have been like in Schubert’s time? In 1782, an Austrian officer who had spent several months in Berlin published a series of notes on the city’s “gallantries,” a euphemism for extramarital sexual life. Among his observations, the officer described the homosexual demimonde he encountered there. At a party one evening, he saw men who “embraced with the warmest tenderness, kissed each other, squeezed hands, and said such sweet things to each other as a fop might say to a lady.” At first, the officer takes “these displays for merely a friendly tone, for true male sympathy or spirits,” until it is explained to him that the affectionate gentlemen are “warm brothers,” that is, men who engage in “Socratic love.”
The host continues this unorthodox educational tour by taking the officer to a Knabentabagie, a “boy establishment” or male bordello. There the soldier observes “a gathering of ten to twelve boys of various ages, men of various character at their sides.” (This is James D. Steakley’s translation in his article in Male Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe.) “With astonishment I watched the embraces with which the older rams met the younger ones. There a foursquare Bacchant toasted his Ganymede with a full wine glass, there a second one cuddled against his boy with the warmest feelings of delight; here on the other hand a loose lad played with the belt of his Zeus, and there a victor disappeared with his Thracian booty.”
Did similar boy establishments exist in Vienna during Schubert’s life? Were there cruising areas? No explicit documentation has yet surfaced, but there is plenty of evidence to suggest that assignations were easily arranged under the pretext of various kinds of male clubs. Another traveler, writing shortly after Schubert’s death, noted that the Viennese had “no great need of streetwalkers or stews, in a city where every liaison which a stranger may choose to form, can be carried on, without offense to morals, even in his hotel or lodgings.”
Maynard’s article was soundly denounced in many circles, as have been other attempts to address the possibility of Schubert’s homosexuality. Such scholars have been deemed crackpots, “determined to drag our Schubert through the mud,” as one particularly hostile Schubert-lover once put it. This “closeting of Schubert,” to use the phrase of musicologist Philip Brett, is supposedly justified on two fronts. The evidence is scanty and inconclusive, the naysayers attest. Moreover, they deny the relevance that Schubert’s sexuality could possibly have on any appreciation or understanding of his music. During my month in Vienna, I had a lot of time to wonder about that.
Musicologist Susan McClary remarks that Schubert “was producing constructions of male subjectivity that differed markedly from most of those that surrounded him.” She points to several features of Schubert’s work—especially his “deviance” from the compositional practices and formal tonal conventions of his day—as evidence of an essentially “effeminate” character to his music. “Schubert,” she goes on to say, “tends to disdain goal-oriented desire per se for the sake of a sustained image of pleasure and an open, flexible sense of self—both of which are quite alien to the constructions of masculinity then being adopted as natural.”
“An open, flexible sense of self”—I’ve often wondered whether we homosexuals engage the world with a sense of self that is more fluid, flexible, and unfinished than do straight people, to whom the prevailing culture offers nicely prepackaged images of who they are and how they should behave. For most of us queer folk, the dominant paradigm holds out none of that—no reassuring roles and clearly defined identities. By and large, we’re left to make it up as we go along, improvising the bittersweet impromptus of our lives, always a little bit aware that we’re deviating from the norm. Is that what I respond to in Schubert, the effeminate, flexible, exploratory character of his music? The pilgrim soul? The night wanderer?
Schubert’s friends affectionately called him Schwammerl, “little mushroom,” though “tubby” would not be an inaccurate translation. In fact, Schubert was quite short, not much over five feet one inch, and quite pudgy. But I can’t for the life of me find the “ugliness” that one historian sees in Schubert’s appearance. On the contrary, for the longest time I’ve thought of him as rather “cute,” the Matt Damon of Biedermeier Vienna. An 1825 watercolor drawing by Wilhelm August Rieder captures the 28-year old Schubert in all his sweet-faced loveliness—the head of curly brown hair, the full lips and delicately sloping nose, the dark sensitive eyes beneath a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles, the dimpled chin. I feel embarrassed even describing the painting. What possible relevance could Schubert’s looks—handsome or not—have on any serious assessment of him as an artist? Is my enthusiasm for Schubert’s music merely an extrapolation of the warm, fuzzy, adolescent charge I used to get—still do get, in fact—over his pretty face? (A friend calls that face “cherubically nerdy.”) Shouldn’t I keep those feelings under wraps, in the closet?
Whatever the source of my pleasure in Schubert, it’s not simple. It encompasses the complexity and mystery of a love affair. For me, Schubert is inexhaustible. Attempts to categorize him—“divinely frivolous,” says one critic; “apocalyptic classicism,” says another—can only hint at the full spectrum of his music’s richness. Say it is happy music, and you soon recall the heaven-storming anguish of the Unfinished Symphony or the terrifying fury of Erlkönig. Say it is bittersweet music, and the raucous jollity of the Octet comes to mind. Say it is sober, and there’s the will-o’-the-wisp sprightliness of the G Major Quartet (D. 887). Delicate? How about the soaring majesty of the Mass in A-flat? Naïve? Listen to the virtuosic complexity of the Wanderer Fantasy. Perhaps the only conclusion to make about Schubert’s music is that it is generous: it does not skimp or hold back. It gives unsparingly, openheartedly, yard after yard, bolt after bolt, of radiant sonic fabric.
Do I have a favorite piece? How can I when there is so much, and it is so good, and so astonishingly varied—the liquid, rippling outpourings of the Impromptu in A-flat (D. 899); the easy, expansive gladness of the Piano Sonata in A Major (D. 664); the heartbreaking tenderness of Lob der Tränen; the haunting and sweet robustness of the music for male chorus; even the schmaltzy romanticism of some of his waltzes, those pieces I played on my Walkman at Schubert’s grave. It is all, as Schubert’s biographer Alfred Einstein once put it, music that has “fallen from heaven.”
ON MY FINAL SUNDAY MORNING in Vienna, I visited Schubert’s birth house. You can get there on the streetcar line that runs up the Nussdorfer Strasse. It’s a modest apartment, one room and a kitchen, 25 square meters in size. Maintained by the city, the reconstruction approximates the state of the dwelling as it was in 1797, the year Schubert was born. Although almost all the Schubert family furniture has disappeared, the curators have deliberately not sought to refurnish the house in similar period pieces. Instead, there’s a simple exhibit of memorabilia: manuscripts; published scores; paintings and drawings of Schubert and other members of his family and circle of friends; a piano once owned by Schubert’s brother Ignaz; a concert program; and, of course, those wire-rimmed spectacles, now cracked.
Various stations around the apartment provide headphones and channels for listening to recordings of Schubert’s music. For an hour that sunny morning, I had the place to myself. I spent most of the time moving from headphone to headphone, just listening to the music, again fighting back tears. Tears over what? The beauty of the music, certainly. But so much else, too. The sense of Schubert’s greatness cut so short. The joy of being in the very room where, as a boy, he lived and made music. The sadness of my Viennese summer coming to an end. The sense of my own mortality, of my smallness, of my chances—for love, for achievement, for leaving something beautiful in the world—dwindling away. But tears of gratefulness as well. For the life of this man, for his inestimable musical legacy.
Nine days before he died, in the last letter he ever wrote—it was to his friend Schober—Schubert mentioned that he was reading the novels of James Fenimore Cooper. He tells Schober that he has already read The Last of the Mohicans, The Spy, The Pilot, and The Pioneers, adding “If you have anything else by him I beg you to leave it for me.”
What was Schubert’s fascination with Cooper? And why, of all people, did he communicate this fascination to Schober, the most decadent member of the Schubert Circle and the one who “lured [him]into loose living”? What did he find so compelling in these German translations of The Leatherstocking Tales? Was it the unbounded American landscapes? the bumptious fledgling democracy? the homoerotic friendship between Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook? The Vienna of Schubert’s time was a repressive police state. Surveillance, arrest, and persecution were commonplace. Metternich, the Austrian foreign minister, was suspicious of any kind of liberalism; peace and quiet were his watchwords. “The head and heart of immature persons must be protected … from the dangerous phantoms of perverted minds” ran the Censorship Edict of 1810. Indeed, Schubert himself was once hauled in for questioning by the police because of his association with student activists. And his poet friend Grillparzer once recorded: “The censor has broken me down—One must emigrate to North America in order to give his ideas free expression.”
One last memory: It is the summer of 1979 and my then boyfriend and I are touring the Iberian peninsula. We’ve come to Mafra, a town forty kilometers northwest of Lisbon, to see the one attraction that the guidebooks say is worth a visit, the Convento-Palácio de Mafra. A combined palace and monastery, it’s one of the largest and most sumptuous (some would say kitschy) baroque complexes in Europe. We’ve toured the church and some of the apartments, and are now taking a rest in one of the courtyards. Suddenly, blaring from a row of huge open windows on the second floor of the building across the way is a loud, scratchy recording of Schubert’s “Marche Militaire”—in an arrangement for wind band!
Checking the guidebook, we discover that part of the complex is now a military barracks. I look up at those second-storey windows again. Inside whatever enormous room they penetrate—a baroque ballroom converted into an indoor parade ground?—the soldiers of the barracks are drilling. I can’t see them, but I can hear the heavy tread of their boots on the floor and the commandant calling out the steps, the rhythms of Portuguese totally out of synch with Schubert’s music: direito! esquerda! Framed in one of the windows, two soldiers in fatigues and berets are relaxing, smoking cigarettes. The whole scene strikes me as incongruous, more charming than serious—the sleepy Sunday morning ambiance in the courtyard, the use of Schubert’s music for a military drill, the casual way that these two soldiers seem to have dropped out of the exercises. But this is Portugal, a few years after the Carnation Revolution toppled a military dictatorship. The sun is shining; everyone is happy.
It’s also the summer I have turned 31, and I am feeling old. And not quite sure about this man I call my boyfriend. We’ve been together about three years. Something isn’t quite right, though it will be several more years before I figure it out—that we’re not suited for each other, that our dreams run in different directions. For now, I just allow myself to fantasize about these beautiful, olive-skinned Portuguese boys playing at being soldiers to tunes by my beloved Franz Schubert.
Now, 27 years later, I wonder about “dreams that go in different directions.” Do they really? I’d like to think that Schubert’s music has taught me that we all ultimately dream the same dream, even if, as Bottom declares, it is “past the wit of man to say” what dream it is. In 1821, Schubert set Schiller’s wonderful poem “Sehnsucht” (D 636)—the word means “longing”—to some of his most impassioned music. It is a poem, and a song, about the soul’s search for a way out of dieses Tales Gründen, the valley’s depths. Beyond the cold mists, the poet can discern lovely hills, harmonious sounds, golden fruits, eternal sunshine, but the madness of a raging storm separates him from this heavenly place, and the boat that might take him across has no boatman. The final stanza, in Richard Wigmore’s translation, concludes:
Jump in without hesitation!
The sails are billowing.
You must trust, and you must dare.
For the gods grant no pledge;
Only a miracle can convey you
To the miraculous land of beauty.
Schubert is one of those miracles in my life. Quite simply, he makes me glad to be alive. In his company, I trust and I dare.
Philip Gambone is the author of Beijing: A Novel (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003).
