A richly detailed examination of the historical reception of Franz Schubert in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe, with a concentration on fin-de-siècle Vienna.
Schubert in the European Imagination: Fin-de-Siècle Vienna examines the composer's historical and cultural reception by Viennese modernists. By 1900, issues of gender had crossed with those of nationalism, especially in thecity that came to consider Schubert as its favorite musical son. As Messing here explains and explores in rich detail, composers, writers, and visual artists manipulated the conventions of the composer and gender in ways that critiqued the very culture that had created this image.
In order to expose the hypocrisy of social relationships, painter Gustav Klimt and writers Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Peter Altenberg exploited the collision between innocence and sexuality, and Schubert was a readily familiar sign for the former.
The composer Arnold Schoenberg substituted his own formulation of Schubert in place of the older, popular conceptions of the composer, adding him to an illustrious list of figures whose significance he sought to redesign.
Scott Messing is Charles A. Dana Professor of Music at Alma College, and author of Neoclassicism in Music (University ofRochester Press, 1996).
