Schubert at the Piano II

Schubert at the Piano II (1899) was commissioned for the music room of the Vienna industrialist Nikolaus Dumba, alongside a companion painting, Music II, as part of a decorative ensemble for his Ringstrasse palace. The subject — Franz Schubert at the keyboard surrounded by listening women in candlelight — was a favourite of Viennese Biedermeier nostalgia, that idealization of pre-1848 domestic musical culture as an antidote to the social upheavals of modernity. Klimt's version transforms the genre scene into something more charged: the candlelight creates an atmosphere of erotic warmth, and the listening women's rapt expressions carry a Symbolist intensity absent from conventional Biedermeier representations. The painting was destroyed in 1945 when Schloss Immendorf in Lower Austria — where the Dumba collection was stored for wartime safekeeping — was burned by retreating SS troops, one of the most significant losses of Klimt's work from the Second World War. It survives only in photographs and preparatory studies, making documentation particularly important.

Known primarily through photographs, the lost painting demonstrated Klimt's mastery of artificial candlelight effects derived from his study of Rembrandt and the Munich Dunkelmalerei tradition. The intimate horizontal format suited the domestic music-room setting, while the concentrated warm light source created a mood of private sensory absorption.