Beginning with the “open secret” of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears's relationship and continuing through debates over Handel's and Schubert's sexuality and analyses of Ethel Smyth's memoirs, biography has played a central role in the development of queer musicology. At the same time, life-writing's focus on extramusical details and engagement with difficult-to-substantiate anecdotes and rumors often seem suspect to scholars. In the case of early-twentieth-century music research, however, these very gaps and ambiguities paradoxically offered some authors and readers at the time rare spaces for approaching questions of sexuality in music. Issues of subjectivity in instrumental music aligned well with rumors about autobiographical confession within Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6 ( Pathétique ) for those who knew how to listen and read between the lines. This article considers the different ways in which the framing of biographical anecdotes and gossip in scholarship by music critic-turned-amateur sexologist Edward Prime-Stevenson and Tchaikovsky scholar Rosa Newmarch allowed for queer readings of symphonic music. It evaluates Prime-Stevenson's discussions of musical biography and interpretation in The Intersexes (1908/9) and Newmarch's Tchaikovsky: His Life and Works (1900), translation of Modest Tchaikovsky's biography, and article on the composer in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians to explore how they addressed potentially taboo topics, engaged with formal and informal sources of biographical knowledge (including one another's work), and found their scholarly voices in the absence of academic frameworks for addressing gender and sexuality. While their overt goals were quite different—Newmarch sought to dismiss “sensationalist” rumors about Tchaikovsky's death for a broad readership, while Prime-Stevenson used queer musical gossip as a primary source in his self-published history of homosexuality—both grappled with questions of what can and cannot be read into a composer's life and works and how to relate to possible queer meanings in symphonic music. The very aspects of biography that place it in a precarious position as scholarship ultimately reveal a great deal about the history of musicology and those who write it.

Unlike Wagner, Mahler, or Schoenberg, Johannes Brahms is often absent from discussions of Viennese fin-de-siècle psychological theories and their intersections with musical culture. The privileged context depicting an aging Brahms resistant to new trends in politics and the arts discourages the notion that he would have known and been influenced by any such developments in the developing field of psychology or psychological arts. As a case study exploring Brahms’s potential engagement in these areas, this article reexamines the contested “legend” of Brahms playing piano in dive bars as an adolescent, not to determine its veracity, but in part to reveal how this motif functions in two different narrative models of Brahms biographies to about 1933. In the first model, the composer emerges spotless from the trials of a low-income childhood; in the second, however, he remains scarred by the unhealthy sexual climate of the bars. I argue that cultural-intellectual contexts in fin-de-siècle Vienna influenced Brahms’s attempts to shape his biographical narratives and that both models could have originated with Brahms himself. From Paolo Mantegazza’s sexology treatises to Hermann Bahr’s scandalous plays, the Viennese reading public was confronted with both scientific and literary material that conflated psychology, sexuality, and personal identity, while other artists such as Max Klinger sought to explore the unconscious motivations behind behaviors. In this context, we may reevaluate anecdotal evidence in which Brahms accords his adult problems to a traumatic childhood experience of playing piano in dangerous establishments: it suggests that Brahms could have taken part in fin-de-siècle trends of self-analysis and psychologized autobiography.

Richard Wagner's Siegfried constitutes something of an anomaly within the Ring cycle: the epic narrative of the Nibelungs and Valsungs grinds to a virtual halt, while two characters, Mime and Siegfried, reenact the fairy tale of the ““youth who went forth to learn what fear is.”” The fairy tale's mythic framework nevertheless reasserts itself within the fairytale enclosure in the guise of sexuality, in particular sexual difference: As Siegfried begins asking troubling questions about his paternity, Mime is thrust into the role of unitary origin, culminating in his desperate claim that he is Siegfried's ““father and mother.”” This article explores how exactly Wagner stages the tug of war between Siegfried and Mime over sexual difference, in particular in act I of Siegfried , allying different ways of conceiving descent, knowledge, and love with either the epic or the anti-epic (which Wagner associates with the fairy tale). This turns the generic struggle at the heart of Siegfried into a struggle between two kinds of families laying claim to Siegfried's paternity: the Gods of Valhalla who reproduce sexually, and the Nibelungs who are capable only of asexual reproduction of the self-same. This article argues that Wagner draws on his own speculations on sexuality, race, and history, in particular his idiosyncratic reading of Schopenhauer, to overlay this opposition not only with moral significations, but racial ones as well.