The subject for this book arose from modest beginnings. In 1994, I was searching for a suitable topic in connection with applying to attend a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar at Columbia University on German modernism led by Walter Frisch. Three years earlier, I had published an article on the circumstances surrounding Vienna’s commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of Beethoven’s birth, an event that became embroiled in the controversy over the so-called music of the future.¹ With Schubert’s centennial falling in 1897—an auspicious year of musical, cultural, and political change in Vienna during which Brahms died, Mahler...

When Franz Schubert died on November 19, 1828, he left a legacy that included about one hundred published works circulating principally in Austria and Germany, a respectable collection of panegyrics by Viennese obituarists, and an uncertain number of admirers that nonetheless included one zealous teenager studying law in Leipzig who had written (but not sent) a letter to the older composer earlier that summer and who had recorded in his diary the single word “dismay” upon learning of Schubert’s passing. One year later, that youthful enthusiast, Robert Schumann, wrote to his piano teacher Friedrich Wieck asking him to send to...

Schumann’s invention of Schubert’s Mädchencharakter came at a time when gendered descriptions of music were aesthetic constructions common enough to find their way into the composer’s prose and to have an impact on his compositional allusions to his predecessor. To judge by later references to his article, Schumann often served as the authoritative touchstone for the early attempts to place Schubert in a historical context. Certainly the reappearance of Schumann’s Mädchencharakter essay in a collection of his writings in 1854 was an impetus to Schubert’s emergence as a composer worthy of serious consideration, even as it encouraged the mimicry of...

The chasteness of Schubert’s relationships with women was of a piece with fabrications of the composer that emphasized his shyness or indecision, traits that for decades had buttressed notions of his Mädchencharakter. Certainly the reception of this image was common in Austria, where local traditions and the familiarity of language made the composer’s works, especially his Lieder, easily accessible. Also, the symbolic treatment of his music in an imagined setting, whether written or visual, was comprehensible to an audience that remained largely circumscribed by a shared culture, at least through the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Indeed, an early...

Although works of art that imagined the composer and his friends playing and listening to his music at a Schubertiade constituted a tradition that began in his own lifetime (and will serve as the context for Gustav Klimt’s painting Schubert at the Piano, to be discussed in the second volume of this study), the portrait of an individual performing one of his works without its creator’s presence, as depicted in the 1846 Viennese cartoon, was an exceptional occurrence before the mid-century. As Schubert’s reputation grew, a modest but telling group of visual images appeared that echoed features of his Mädchencharakter....

Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, Schubert’s popularity enjoyed a near-continuous progress extending well beyond local Viennese admiration. As secure as his reputation was by 1900, however, his significance did not go completely uncontested. The debate over the composer among a group of English writers during the last two decades of the century indicates that even so beloved an icon as Schubert did not acquire his stature without controversy. This polemic also illustrates the perils that could arise from the desire to accept too intimate an association between biography and creativity.

During the quarter century that followed his...

This book has documented the nineteenth century’s reception of Schubert and his music from the standpoint of gender. It located a point of origin in Schumann’s coining of the term Mädchencharakter in 1838 and considered its ramifications in that composer’s criticism and music. The subsequent invocation of this term during the second half of the nineteenth century reflects its significance in the formulation of Schubert’s identity. Further, the frequency with which the composer’s music was construed as feminine indicates that this idea became embedded in Schubert’s reception, extending beyond history, biography, and criticism. In contemporary works of literature and art,...