Franz Schubert is — alongside Bach — my favorite classical composer, for the range of his supremely moving works, including his songs and piano pieces; his String Quintet in C; and his Symphony 9 in C major, subtitled “The Great.” Schubert’s music, whether for large or small forces, flows clearly and naturally like a mountain stream. It is noble, heartfelt, eloquent, and unaffectedly direct. Because Schubert, a roundfaced and amiable character, died at age 31, many of his works were only published and performed posthumously, and he seems to invite all kinds of biographical interpretation. The latest of the crop is “Schubert in the European Imagination, Volume 1: The Romantic and Victorian Eras” by Scott Messing (University of Rochester Press, 334 pages, $55.00).

New York concertgoers may recall the heated sexual orientation debate around Schubert — Was he gay? Was he straight? Who cares? — a dozen years ago during lectures at the 92nd Street Y, which sparked waspish exchanges in the columns of the New York Review of Books and earnest justifications in the New York Times. Whether in fact Schubert was gay or straight — which, in any case, never seriously influenced how his music sounds — it now appears there is a new argument to consider.

As documented in Mr. Messing’s book, at least one influential 19th-century writer maintained that Schubert resembled a black woman. When Schubert’s remains were exhumed in Vienna in 1863, his skull was described by an early biographer as having a “delicate, almost womanly structure” as well as a “Moorish (Negroid) appearance.”

Mr. Messing, a Professor of Music at Alma College in Michigan, explains that the notion of Schubert as African-American and feminine (or female) was a logical progression from an 1838 article penned by the composer Robert Schumann. According to Schumann, Schubert had a “girlish” or “maidenly” personality (Mädchencharakter in the original German). In direct contrast to Beethoven’s monumental life and works, full of towering rages, the only Schubert works familiar to the early 19th-century listener were songs and light piano pieces performed in living rooms, usually by females. Schumann did not merely contrast Schubert as a girly-man — to adopt a Schwarzeneggerian term — with the bullish macho man Beethoven. Schumann also defined a “wifely rapport” between the music of Schubert and Beethoven; in 1838 Schumann wrote to his wife-to-be Clara, asking her to place myrtle branches on the graves of Schubert and Beethoven in a Vienna cemetery in order to perform a “symbolic marriage” between Schubert and Beethoven.

Mr. Messing traces how, by the 1850s, Vienna’s cartoonists in the press and music historians alike considered Schubert’s music an effeminate pursuit. One critic, Louis Köhler, called Schubert a “feminine Beethoven” who possessed a “maidenly nature.” Music writers then, as now, relied heavily on commonplaces and the idée récue was that Schubert was “womanly.” Small wonder that a 19th-century novelist like Henry James described in “The Bostonians” a failed suffragette listening to Schubert as a salve for her frustrated political ambitions. Along the same lines, “À Rebours” by the Belgian novelist Joris Karl Huysmans depicts a highly effeminate aesthete as idolizing Schubert’s music, which “thrilled him to the very marrow.” Mr. Messing also addresses the visual arts, reproducing paintings by the Spanish artist Francisco Masriera and the Belgian Gustave de Jonghe, both titled “A Melody of Schubert,” and both depicting an all-female group of domestic performers and listeners.

Perhaps even more striking is how insightful professional musicians assimilated the message of Schubert-as-woman, while admiring and performing his works. The mighty pianist Artur Schnabel, one of the first to rediscover — and record — Schubert’s majestic, large-scale piano sonatas, explained that the composer’s lesser works were a “playground for sentimental governesses, for ‘Victorian spinsters.'” Even the acclaimed Viennese conductor Felix Weingartner commented that Schubert was a “somewhat feminine complement to Beethoven.” And Britain’s Sir George Grove wrote in his vastly influential “Dictionary of Music and Musicians,” that, “compared with Beethoven, Schubert is as a woman to a man.” Elsewhere, a friend of Grove’s recalled that Sir George “loved Schubert with almost feminine devotion.”

This detailed tracing of perceptions — and misperceptions — of a composer builds anticipation for the forthcoming second volume of “Schubert in the European Imagination,” announced for April 2007, which will deal with fin-desiècle Vienna, among other intriguing cultural interpretations.

However wrongheaded or frankly bizarre some of these views may be, they represent an unparalleled depth of available material about an indisputably great composer. Black or not, feminine or not, Schubert wrote the song cycle “Die Winterreise”; the Fantasie for piano and violin in C; the piano trios in B flat and E flat; the Tantum Ergo in E flat major and the last three piano sonatas. The misprisions surrounding these majestic accomplishments — and the peculiar prejudices and preconceptions about the man who wrote them — should serve as a humbling lesson to music writers today.

Mr. Ivry is author of biographies of Francis Poulenc (Phaidon) and Maurice Ravel (Welcome Rain).