La música II

Nikolaus Dumba, a Vienna businessman of Greek descent who collected Schubert manuscripts, had the rooms of his Ringstrasse palace decorated by the best-known painters in the city, Makart among them, and handed the music room to Klimt. Klimt set two panels above its doors. This was the second, finished in 1898, 150 by 200 centimetres. In 1943 Austrian collections were moved out of the city to country houses to get them away from the bombing, and Klimt paintings including this one went to Schloss Immendorf in Lower Austria. In May 1945, after the fighting there had stopped, SS troops blew the castle up and it burned. Nothing stored inside is known to have come out. What survives of it now are photographs and the oil studies Klimt made while working towards it.