Schubert at the piano I 1896

Gustav Klimt painted "Schubert at the Piano I" in Austria, using oil on canvas, sometime around the turn of the 20th century. It depicts an imagined scene of the composer Schubert playing for a gathering of friends. But this painting can tell us a lot about the cultural institutions of Vienna at the time. Musical salons were common amongst the upper-middle classes; Schubert himself often played in such settings. Klimt’s deliberately indistinct style seems to suggest the haziness of memory. But the painting also recalls earlier artistic styles that depicted similar scenes from Schubert’s life, such as those by Wilhelm August Rieder. We can explore how Klimt deliberately recalls and breaks with these artistic traditions. Research into the social history of music could reveal how and why Klimt’s painting resonated with his original viewers.