Political Crimes and Liberty, or Why Would Schubert Eat a Peacock?
In an influential and original article published in this journal in 1989,' Maynard Solomon put forward a provocative interpretation of the cryptic, by now infamous, entry in the playwright Eduard von Bauernfeld's diary from August 1826: "I am to translate Shakespeare's poems and sonnets for Sollinger. So be it! Schubert out of sorts (he requires 'young peacocks' like Benv. Cellini). Schwind morose, Schober idle, as usual. I am till full of travel-fever and vigor!"2 In sharp contrast to earlier interpretations of this diary passage by Otto Erich Deutsch and Eric Sams, Solomon rejected the association of the young peacocks with Cellini's (and by extension Schubert's) syphilis, proposing instead that th diary entry was an oblique reference to Schubert's probable homosexuality. Solomon arg ed that the many hunts for peacocks and other wild birds recounted in Cellini's Vita are
Schubert, Platen, and the Myth of Narcissus
When Franz Schubert9s friend Franz von Bruchmann returned to Vienna in 1821 from his studies in Erlangen, he brought with him August von Platen9s Ghaselen just off the press. Soon after, Schubert set two Platen texts. A reviewer for the Leipzig Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung singled out "Die Liebe hat gelogen" as particularly incomprehensible, in part because he found Schubert9s radical harmony to be unmotivated by the text. The daring harmonic language of the second Platen song has struck even recent critics as excessive, yet none have addressed the textual motivation for Schubert9s extreme expression. Both poems concern ill-fated homosexual love, "Du liebst mich nicht" most explicitly, if obliquely: the poem is a veiled reflection on the myth of Narcissus, a myth Platen frequently drew on as a symbol for his own homosexuality.
Historical perspectives on homosexuality
Contents Foreword * Introduction * The Myth of Lesbian Impunity: Capital Laws From 1270 to 1791 * A Lesbian Execution in Germany, 1721: The Trial Records * Sodomy and Heresy in Early Modern Switzerland * Conceptions of Homosexuality and Sodomy in Western Europe * Ho Hum, Another Work of the Devil: Buggery and Sodomy in Early Stuart England * Defining Sodomy in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts * "Writhing Bedfellows": 1826--Two Young Men From Antebellum South Carolina's Ruling Elite Share "Extravagant Delight" * The "Third Sex" Theory of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs * Inverts, Perverts, and Mary-Annes: Male Prostitution and the Regulation of Homosexuality in England in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries * "Stigmata of Degeneration": Prisoner Markings in Nazi Concentration Camps * The Pink Triangle: The Persecution of Homosexual Males in Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany * The Homosexual Rights Movement in the United States: A Traditionally Overlooked Area of American History * Homosexuality in History: An Annotated Bibliography * Index