As for the issue of homosexuality, Mr. Solomon's case is compellingly argued, but I defer to scholars for a final verdict. The most vexing problems arise in judging the musical importance of the composer's sexuality. Mr. Solomon asserts, for example, that Schubert's homosexuality demonstrated a "resistance to compulsion" and that it revealed a "heroic region in Schubert's personality." But while Schubert obviously possessed a profound knowledge of suffering and isolation, heroism seems alien to his compositions, imported from some contemporary views of sexual "unorthodoxy."

Similarly, Ms. McClary, in attempting to interpret the "Unfinished" Symphony as homosexual program music, seemed mostly concerned with giving a positive sexual spin to the piece. She spoke of "casual pleasures and encounters" in the music, "beautifully wrought cadential unions" and passages in which the theme "yields up its rigid sense of identity." She found the music "purposeful, ingenious and liberatory" and compared its style to contemporary gay literature.

Ms. McClary didn't provide any new harmonic analyses; instead she provided metaphors, most of which were deliberate attempts to frame the work in a contemporary fashion. Desire, of course, is fundamental to 19th-century music and homosexuality, as an important biographical fact, is bound to have some impact on musical composition. But we don't have a clear view of homosexuality in 19th-century Vienna, let alone how it might express itself in music or why Schubert's achievement should resemble contemporary homosexual literature. The nature or even existence of homosexual taste is one of the great unexplored esthetic issues.

Much more care is required in examining such notions. All significant composers, by dint of their originality, are "idiosyncratic": this doesn't suggest marginality. Shifting harmonies are as "slippery" in other Romantic repertory as in Schubert. And the "Unfinished" has hardly been "shamefully" judged as failing to live up to Beethoven's masculine model.

The most convincing argument of the day was a description by Leon Botstein, the historian and president of Bard College, of the importance of Schubert to the Viennese. Mr. Botstein argued that the devotion Schubert inspired among men's choruses in Vienna was not just due to a love of his music. Schubert was seen as a composer who rose out of old Vienna and wrote directly and simply for listeners and for amateur singers. He came to represent a lost, pre-modern world; he became an icon for xenophobic national movements. This helps explain how Schubert could so easily inspire nostalgic kitsch. Mr. Botstein's ideas tended to get lost in the closing panel, in which the four speakers were joined by Mr. Solomon, a young Schubert scholar Christopher Gibbs and a specialist on Schubert's circle, David Gramit.

Finally, as praiseworthy and well planned as the enterprise was, I found the main polemical edge of the Schubertiade unconvincing. Despite Hollywood images, we don't have an innocent view of Schubert; that is why it was so easy to laugh at a film that did. I doubt whether sweet innocence was even accepted in the 19th century when "Erlkonig," hardly a piece of innocuous melodiousness, was Schubert's best-known song.

And as the symposium showed, the view of Schubert as a "marginal" figure is itself not a marginal view, but in the mainstream of contemporary interpretation. Our cultural pantheon practically requires marginality and alienation as an entrance requirement, expanding the Romantic myths of the artist we contend we are rejecting. We have created a contemporary Schubert; but speaking about him has proven less revelatory than hearing him speak in his own knowing, caressing and tragic voice.