The Intersexes is a strange book with an even stranger history. Self-published under the pseudonym “Xavier Mayne” sometime around 1909, probably in Florence (but possibly elsewhere), it represents Prime-Stevenson’s attempt to construct a history of homosexuality that was a kind of artistic/literary/humanities-based answer to medical sexology of Richard von Krafft-Ebing (to whom the book is dedicated) and Magnus Hirschfeld (acknowledged in the introduction). Despite the obvious limitation on the readership placed on a small print run and carefully managed distribution, Prime-Stevenson cites this work by “Mayne” in at least three works published under his own name, including an article on Wagner’s Parsifal and some of his short fiction.
The section on music in The Intersexes contains a number of queer musical allusions that recur across Prime-Stevenson’s music criticism and fiction. (It also gives an accurate sense of some of Prime-Stevenson’s favorite turns of phrase and (mis)spellings!):
Music an Eternal
Prime-Stevenson (as “Xavier Mayne”), The Intersexes: A History of Similisexualism as a Problem in Social Life (Florence(?): Privately Printed, ca. 1909), 396-7.
Sphynx of Art.
It can be theorized further, that music has an articulate significance, seemingly dangerous. Is it not possibly a language, the broken diction of intenser existences, of which we catch troublous accents?—a speech which if—or because?—misunderstood cannot be for the good of mankind? Is the eternally music-loving, music-making, intersexual Uranian verily a sort of creature from another sphere?—still in touch with it?—an “Overman”, an “Over-Soul?—one ever sharply sensitive to the language of his early Somewhere Else, and alert to the chief medium for its communications, however little he or we may now understand it? Composers present homosexual types; during either all their lives, or portion of them. The supreme secret of the noble-natured and moral Beethoven seems to have been an idealized homosexualism. In Beethoven’s sad latest days, can be traced a real passion for that unworthy nephew Carl; who, it is said, once sought to extort money from Beethoven, on threats to disclose an homosexual relationship! Beethoven’s beautiful sonata, Opus 111, in often called among German and Austrian Uranians, “The Uranian Sonata”, from some legendary “in-reading” of the work. The death of the brilliant and unhappy Russian composer Tschaikowsky has been affirmed (if denied with equal conviction) as a suicide, not a sudden illness, in consequence of terror of a scandal that hung over him—a relative being spoken of as the persecutor. Some homosexual hearers of Tschaikowsky’s last (and most elegiac) symphony, known as the “Pathetic” claim to find in it such revelations of a sentimental-sexual kind that they have nicknamed the work the “Pathic” Symphony. Brahms and the colossal Bruckner have been characterized as “the ultimate voices in a homosexual message by symphonic music”; even if one sub-consciously uttered.
Prime-Stevenson’s ideas about queer identity and the arts resonate with similar theories espoused by Edward Carpenter (who also seems to have been interested in potentially queer readings of Beethoven’s piano music) and Magnus Hirschfeld. Although his claims about Beethoven, Brahms, and Bruckner here go uncited–and might seem rather shocking to anyone with a passing familiarity with their respective biographies–I argue that they represent an intriguing counter-reading of music history in the absence of more accessible queer evidence and musicological discourse. All three were known as longtime bachelors who had complicated relationships with women and very close (if often equally complicated) personal friendships with men. In this except, Prime-Stevenson appears to map the “known” details of Tchaikovsky’s life, sexuality, and death (themselves tied to queer gossip already circulating in Anglophone circles in the 1890s) onto Beethoven’s life, relationships, and music. References to a gay reading of Beethoven’s music also appear in “Mayne’s” novel Imre: A Memorandum (ca. 1906) and Prime-Stevenson’s revised collection of music criticism Long-Haired Iopas (1927).
Unusually for The Intersexes (which despite its length and interdisciplinary span, lacks a bibliography), Prime-Stevenson does go on to cite a few sources about queer readings of Wagnerian music drama:
Considerations
Prime-Stevenson, The Intersexes, 397-8.
of Music and
Sexualism.
Gustav Naumann lately has written a brochure on the theory that art is living, interesting and alluring solely because of its sexual power and sexual quality; solely because of direct working on the sexual instincts of men and women. This influence may exist, even when they are not aware of it, by inseparably sensuo-sexual aspects of the artistic product or performance which they admire. Naumann lays stress on modern dramatic music (especially Wagner’s) as “disturbing.” our natural sexual harmony and wholesome repose of being; as acting on it unfavourably and excitingly. He claims that chaster and more classic forms of music have a tranquilizing operation; are in better sexual accord with the healthful man. The argument is interesting certainly. Most, if not all all, music seems indissolubly connected with the nervous-generative systems, in men and beasts. If some finer, forms, styles and schools of it do not seem at all sexuo-nervously irritant they are those that are palely elementary, or to which humanity is now accustomed—much as it grows wonted to dubious airs, evil waters or harmful chemical beverages. Unless in simple, familiar ambients, our contemporary human race does not receive music in sexual calm. A pastoral melody on a flute, a ballad on a mandoline may soothe us, as we think; so minute is the unwholesome effect on us. As music’s dramatic force and complexity thicken, we ourselves are much as beasts whose nerves quiver when a pianoforte is played, or when a sonorous is march sounded on a military band.
Wagner’s music-dramas can be directly an agent of seduction; of loss of sexual control and self-poise. A noted European physician, a dionysian-uranian, once told the writer that a performance of “Tristan and Isolde” was always sufficient to excite him sexually, and that he knew many individuals on whom Wagner acted as an aphrodisiac. A distinguished French student of psychiatrics has stated that the Bayreuth Wagner Festivals represent a kind of homosexual forcing-house. This topic has been treated by the philosophic art-writer Kufferath. Wagner himself, with adroit audacity, chose a covertly homosexual subject for his ripest and most sensuous music-drama, “Parsifal”. A fine study of this matter has been written by the well-known American critic, James G. Huneker, in an American periodical, in course of a “Parsifal” analysis, unfortunately not printed entire in the authour’s studies as collected in book-form.
Gustav Naumann is presumably the publisher and author of a lengthy commentary on Nietzsche’s works. The “distinguished French student of psychiatrics” might be Marc-André Raffalovich, whose book Uranisme et unisexualité: étude sur différentes manifestations de l’instinct sexuel (1896) was a clear model for The Intersexes. “The philosophic art-writer Kufferath” is almost certainly Belgian music critic Maurice Kufferath, author of Le théâtre de Richard Wagner: de Tannhäuser à Parsifal. Essais de critique littéraire, esthétique et musicale (1891–1899).
I have been unable to positively identify the “distinguished European physician,” although he might be one of the subjects interviewed in Hirschfeld’s case studies (given the use of the term “dionysian-uranian,” a sexological term for bisexuality, he is presumably not Hirschfeld himelf).
The Intersexes is available via the Internet Archive here. I also discuss Prime-Stevenson’s interest in searching for queer musical meanings in my blog post for NOTCHES: (Re)marks on the History of Sexuality.