According to a recent "Great Composers" biography for children,
Franz Schubert "fell in and out of love as frequently as any
healthy young man" but was chronically poor and shy. He was so
much in awe of Beethoven that "he was petrified and ran out of
the room when the great man asked him a question." According to
recent scholarship, Schubert was a member of a stigmatized and
clandestine homosexual subculture. His bohemian marginality
signified not reticence but stubborn independence: freedom from
familial constraint and social convention. It is hard to think
of another 19th-century creative personality whose portraiture
has been so drastically skewed. What is more, these polarized
perceptions -- the first recycling Romantic stereotypes of
suffering genius, the second introducing present-day grapplings
with sexuality and gender -- correlate with polarized
impressions of Schubert the musician. His output is more
belatedly and incompletely known than that of any other major
composer. These are some of the "Persp