Schubert in the European Imagination: Fin-de-Siecle 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 the city 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...

In Schubert in the European Imagination, Volume 1: The Romantic and Victorian Eras, Scott Messing examines the historical reception of Franz Schubert as conveyed through the gendered imagery and language of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European culture. The concept of Schubert as a feminine type vaulted into prominence in 1838 when Robert Schumann described the composer's Madchencharakter (-girlish- character), by contrast to the purportedly more masculine, more heroic Beethoven. What attracted Schumann to Schubert's music and marked it as feminine is evident in some of Schumann's...

The first historical and critical study of neoclassicism from the genesis of the concept in fin de siecleFrance in the 1870s through the Schoenberg/Stravinsky polemic. By the end of the nineteenth century the traits of -classicism- in music had become clearly established. This codification cast long shadows over contemporary artists, encouraging a movement away from order, continuity and tradition towards freedom, innovation and novelty - and the term neoclassicism made its first appearance. This study, the first ever critical examination of -neoclassicism- in music, provides a broad cultural...