Taboo and Biographical Innovation: Mozart, Beethoven, Shubert

Abstract

The lives of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert offer instances in which materials sufficient to lead to significant discoveries had long been available, but their implications had been overlooked by generations of scholars. Such biographical innovations may be blocked by taboos centering on sexuality, ancestry, power, and authority. In Mozart's life, taboo attaches to his penchant for obscenity and the carnivalesque; to Leopold Mozart's domination of his children and to his disinheritance of Mozart; and to the stench of decay that emanated from Mozart's dying body. In Beethoven's case, taboos are invoked in connection with birth and ancestry fantasies, derivatives of a proliferating family romance. With Schubert, taboo centers on his openness to unorthodox sexual experience, including homosexuality. In many instances, taboos of a psychological and institutional nature block the emergence of biographical innovations, which are avoided because they partake of the forbidden. Thus, a central problem for historians is to locate sources of authorization to recognize and perhaps to resolve biographical taboos. Is psychoanalysis, which enjoins us to interrogate every detail of a person's life, including thoughts and dreams, an appropriate theory for such investigations of pathways through the tangle of prohibitions a biographer must negotiate? Or is it, too, implicated in its own particular set of taboos?