Allegoria della musica sacra

Klimt was 23 and in business. With his brother Ernst and their friend Franz Matsch he ran a firm that decorated the theatres going up all over Austria-Hungary, most of them built to one pattern by the Viennese architects Fellner and Helmer. The job in 1885 was the new municipal theatre in Fiume, the empire's Adriatic port, the city now called Rijeka. Its ceiling called for a cycle of allegories of the different kinds of music, and the three painters worked the large ovals up on canvas in their Vienna studio rather than on site, then shipped them south. This is the working design for one of the seven, the woman at the organ. The theatre opened that same year with the ovals in place, and this study, under 40 centimetres high, stayed behind in Vienna.