"Schubert was plenty heroic!"

Leon Botstein, American conductor, music historian & president of Bard College: His songs are designed for everyone’s use; it becomes the language of hidden personal expression of intimacy that can be displayed publicly. And that’s a magic formula. I can sing these songs or listen to them, and I can do this in a public space, even though the subject is intimate. It creates a universe of personal freedom.

Leon Botstein, American conductor, music historian & president of Bard College: Music is not tennis or football. I don’t have to rank people like in sport. I would reformulate the question: Am I persuaded to consider Schubert one of the great composers in Western musical tradition? And the answer is clearly: Yes! The hardest thing to do in music is to write a great tune. And Schubert was one of the greatest tune writers of all time. He integrated Volksmusik (folk music) and Konzertmusik (concert music) with one another.

Leon Botstein, American conductor, music historian & president of Bard College: Yes! We think of Vienna as the city of music, but in fact none of its great composers were Viennese. Not Haydn, Beethoven, nor Brahms. Among the great canonic composers, Schubert is the only one, who is a real hometown boy. He has in his ear what I would call a “local sensibility.” What is universal about Schubert derives from the local. And in the 19th century he becomes the emblem of an old Vienna.

Leon Botstein, American conductor, music historian & president of Bard College: The darkness of the music has to do with the darkness of that period. Schubert’s generation came of age after the destruction of all these liberal ideas of the French Revolution. They were born into Metternich’s police system, into a place of increasing disease and poverty. Why shouldn’t their artistic expression be one of longing and despair? If you consider daily life in Vienna at the time, this was a place without sanitation system, with regular epidemics, and incredible poverty. People lost children in infancy on a regular basis! So those of us cuddled by vaccination, central heating, plumbing, ventilators, and aspirin bottles, have no idea what it was like to be alive in 1820.

Leon Botstein, American conductor, music historian & president of Bard College: As a musician I don’t think biography is a key to understanding someone’s work. But the question of sexuality is relevant to Schubert because so much of his music deals with the storyline of desire, lack of fulfilment, and unrecognized love. The same complex issues that are in Goethe’s "Sorrows of Young Werther". Since so much of the music seems to be expressive of the existential condition of intimacy and of aloneness, of a dialogue with oneself, of dreaming, of trying to escape the terrifying aspects of daily life, it’s not inappropriate to ask the question: what was his personal life like? Because of Heinrich Berté’s musical and the way Schubert was represented in the film world in the early 20th century, he somehow got stuck with being the young lover. He became a stand-in for the passionate heterosexual. He became a modern Werther. The problem with that is … it’s a bit of a fraud. It is only since the late 19th century, and accelerated by Oscar Wilde, that homosexuality enters the public conversation as "abnormal.” In Schubert’s lifetime, bisexuality was commonplace. It was not unusual, nor anything that anybody paid any attention to. He didn’t identify himself as homosexual or heterosexual. He was simply sexual. And it seems to me that Maynard Solomon and other historians have made a very good case that his intimate relationships probably extended to men and women.

Leon Botstein, American conductor, music historian & president of Bard College: There was no need to closet! That is my point.

Leon Botstein, American conductor, music historian & president of Bard College: In this period of history, there is no clear gender rhetoric. Schubert was plenty heroic! This idea of a determinist female or male mode of expression is an imposition from contemporary dialogue onto the past. It is trying to cut the past to fit the present. For example, Tchaikovsky became the music of heterosexual desire, "Romeo and Juliet,” and he was a confirmed homosexual. The "heroic" Wagner … his music is completely filled with homoerotic sensibilities. And the fact that Schubert may have slept with men is completely unexceptional. Nobody paid a wits bit of attention to it. That is a phenomenon of a later 19th century and has continued through our day unfortunately. I think it tells you more about our time, than it tells you about Schubert.