During Schubert's life, he was more or less ignored by nearly all women and most men. Then, for most of the nineteenth and twentieth century, he was depicted as a chaste musical saint whose tragic early death from syphilis was excused as the terrible consequence of his one and only dalliance. And now, at the start of the twenty-first century, Schubert has become a poster boy for gay rights activists who see in his passionate attachments to his friends either a successor of the Greek philosophical forum or a predecessor of the Continental Baths. Apparently, the one thing Schubert has always been denied is a conventional sex life.

Yet, whatever else he may or may not have been, Schubert was once an 18-year-old boy on the verge of manhood, and from some of the musical evidence he seems to have wanted the same thing that most 18-year-olds want: women and lots of them. In his bawdy setting of Josef von Ratschky's translation of Abraham Cowley's hot-blooded poem "The Philanderer" Der Weiberfreund, D. 271 from August 1815, Schubert could love a million girls and every girl a twin. Although clearly modeled on Papageno's risqué songs from Die Zauberflöte, Schubert's lusty singer's three bouncy duple-time verses are far less coy than Mozart's.

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