Was schubert gay
15 LGBTQ+ composers in classical music history that you probably already know
Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)
Edward Benjamin Britten is one of the finest composers of English operas, choral works, and songs, many of which he wrote for his life significant other, tenor Sir Peter Pears.
Britten started writing harmony as young as nine, when he wrote an oratorio. He studied under Frank Bridge, John Ireland and Arthur Benjamin among others, and was also a fine pianist.
His ground-breaking operas, which include Peter Grimes (1945), and The Turn of the Screw (1954) – and his famous War Requiem – tackle contemporaneous issues around psychology and post-war trauma, as well his retain homosexuality, which was illegal in Britten’s lifetime.
Britten founded the Aldeburgh Festival in Suffolk with Pears and librettist Eric Crozier.
Dame Ethel Smyth (1858-1944)
Ethel Smyth was a prolific composer and an active member of the women’s suffrage movement, and she made no secret of her relationships with women.
Born in South-East London, Smyth studied at the Leipzig Conservatory and there met composers that included Grieg, Tchaikovsky, Clara Schumann and Brahms. Her best-known works are the ope
Gay days in Old Vienna?
There are some words and phrases in this article which you may opt favor not to have to explain to an eight-year-old; the modern teenager will find them unexceptional; sensitive adults may need a cup of camomile tea handy.
No end to it
In 1989 an American musicologist, Maynard Solomon, published 'evidence' that Franz Schubert and an unspecified number of members of the famous 'circles of friends' around the composer were either homosexuals, bisexuals, and or part of a repressed homosexual subculture among young men in Vienna at the second. Solomon had been banging away at this theme since at least 1981, but the 1989 article seems to have caught the big surf Zeitgeist.
The 'evidence' cited in 1989 by Solomon was refuted utterly by the Schubert/Beethoven scholar Rita Steblin in 1993. Solomon's argumentation was based on misunderstandings and mistranslations of German texts, supported by misquotations, highly selective quoting and bizarre conclusions. There were, for example, instances in which Solomon would seize a German word such as lustig, translate it as 'gay' and then imply that this 'gay' had the same essence as the modern usage of 'gay'. Solomon
The Double Life of Franz Schubert: Der Doppelgänger and Homosexual Identity in 19th Century Vienna
Abstract
The poet Heinrich Heine and the composer Franz Schubert had faced persecution in their social and cultural contexts for aspects of their individuality. Heine grew up during the Napoleonic Wars in Germany, a very turbulent time and environment for Jewish people. This led to conflicting feelings about his own faith, providing the inspiration to document the poem Der Doppelgänger. Heine wrote this poem which incorporated many Jewish undertones, because it was purposely written from a Jewish perspective. Later on, Schubert would use Heine’s Der Doppelgänger as part of his song cycle titled Schwanengesang. Schubert utilizes unique musical elements to illustrate Heine’s themes, such as the consistent utilize of the note F# and a double articulation. Notable musicologists David Bretherton and David Løberg Code are key figures in analyzing the connections built through these musical elements. Though Schubert composed compositions including Hebrew and texts from the Jewish tradition, there is speculation that he did not compose Der Doppelgänger with Heine’s original intentions in intellect. Sch
Supremely Happy Hours
Franz Schubert's (1797–1828) best friends were the brothers Anselm and Josef Hüttenbrenner from Graz. Schubert dedicated "The Trout" quintet to Josef, the younger brother. He and Schubert lodged together for a time in the same house, and he was responsible for collecting together many songs that would otherwise have been lost. Anselm met Schubert while they were both pupils of Salieri, and he gave up the study of law to devote himself to harmony. When his father died in 1821 he moved to the family property in Graz, and visited Vienna only one more time during Schubert's lifetime. Another close friend was Johann Mayrhofer, with whom Schubert shared the matching room in Vienna for two years, when Schubert was twenty-seven and Mayrhofer was seventeen. Mayrhofer wrote the text for many of Schubert's songs. In 1816 Schubert expressed terror at the idea of marriage, and virtually all of his social animation was spent drinking with fellow male students and musicians. His contemporaries recognized that he led a riotous bohemian life but that he was also misogynistic, which some current interpreters have seen as a veiled allusion to his participation in the
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