Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/414

 affecting both musical and unmusical auditors. Here clearly cultivated tastes or quite the contrary are in question. Hence the popularity of Wagner, himself a homosexual nature, and of Richard Strauss. If we turn from the formalized neurotism of such great composers we may say that no music seems as directly sexual as the Magyar; wonderfully beautiful in its rhythms, melodies and harmonies. And the Magyar is a distinctively 'sexual' racial type.

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