Understanding Schubert, with Susan Waterfall

Join us for the virtual world premier of Susan Waterfall’s Understanding Schubert—an 85-minute video biography, with art and portraits from Schubert’s era as well as 16 recorded musical excerpts, including nine lieder—wherein Waterfall explores the cultural context of Schubert’s life and music, his relationship with Romantic lyric poetry, and his position in the middle-class homes and salons of Vienna.

Schubert’s art emphasized individual subjectivity, which was the thrust of Romanticism. With enormous musical and communicative gifts, he offered his vision of the world.

In 1987 Maynard Solomon presented a compelling paper asserting that Schubert was homosexual and died of tertiary syphilis. Solomon claimed that Schubert had written most of his music for a Viennese subculture that was exploring different types of masculinity and reacting to restrictive codes of social behavior. Susan Waterfall avoids extreme characterizations of Schubert as a sexless “tubby tunesmith” and Schubert as a standard bearer for gay musicology.  He becomes a convincing person, with his sexual preferences and activities only part of the troubling circumstances he encountered in modern Viennese life.

Art and photograph collection by Mina Cohen
Filmed and edited by Julian Pollack
Written and directed by Susan Waterfall

Q&A with Susan Waterfall, Julian Pollack and Mina Cohen will follow the screening.

This is a virtual event.