Schubert in the European Imagination, i: The Romantic and Victorian Eras; ii: Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (review)

This, surely, is what musical research is all about: a lone scholar, labouring for more than a decade and producing a monumental monograph that transforms our view of its subject. In terms of scale alone, Scott Messing's book is a formidable achievement; such heavenly length, after all, flies in the face of the constraints of modern academic publishing. And these days, when academics are expected to churn out a new book for every RAE or period of research leave, it is rare for a scholar to be able to devote such a sustained period to a single venture; increasingly, projects that defy the Five-Year Plan mentality of modern academe get left on the back burner or emerge half-baked. While many scholars continue to overcome these obstacles, groundbreaking historical work cannot easily be reconciled with the demand for rapid delivery and guaranteed results. Not every important project requires an elephantine scale and gestation period. But all scholars need the time to take risks, the freedom to explore potentially blind alleys, and the space to experiment with approaches that may not bear fruit. Only through such processes can they acquire the kind of command of a topic that is so amply evident in Messing's monograph. This book is not only a model of work in its field, but a stimulating and timely reminder of what we should all aspire towards.

The sheer length of Messing's monograph may suggest the kind of reception study in which the relentless chronicling of minutiae prevails over interpretative insights. This is emphatically not the case. Rather than attempting to recount the reception of a wide range of individual works, Messing focuses on the broader picture: the key factors that, in his view, shaped Schubert's posthumous reputation and conditioned perceptions of his music. Volume 1 traces the emergence of the idea that Schubert's personality and music possessed feminine characteristics, drawing on a large and varied body of nineteenth-century texts. In addition to shaping how Schubert's works were received, Messing argues that this feminized construction of Schubert was accorded a symbolic function in the novels, dramas, and paintings of the period. In Volume 2, Messing examines how this image was affirmed and refashioned in fin de siècle Vienna, exploring Schubert's place in cultural politics and the emerging science of sexuality. Messing's approach has much to commend it, enabling him to take a richly interdisciplinary approach to reception while pursuing a clear argument through both volumes. Just as importantly, his monograph engages with issues which continue to preoccupy Schubert scholars and are at the heart of much current musicology (as Messing acknowledges, the polemics of the 1980s and early 1990s on Schubert's sexuality provided an important stimulus for his project).

There are, however, some disadvantages to this approach. Does Messing's focus on the feminization of Schubert really allow us to understand the composer's place 'in the European imagination', or does it merely explore the factors that conditioned his popular reception? The view of Schubert as a feminine type was sustained primarily by the popularity of a handful of his songs and short piano pieces within domestic music-making. While these genres clearly did define the popular reception of Schubert, other forms of music—one thinks immediately of his masses and male-voice part-songs—were performed regularly throughout the nineteenth century; the chequered reception of his church music alone would make for a fascinating monograph. The discourse generated by these genres, however, is peripheral to Messing's picture. On one level, this is understandable: even a 300,000-word monograph cannot cover everything. But on another, his impressively dogged quest to demonstrate the feminization of Schubert...