Franz Peter Schubert: The Greatest Love and the Greatest Sorrow

I believe that there are thousands, perhaps millions, of people in the world who will say that Schubert is their favourite composer, but if questioned will not dare to put him on the level of Beethoven or Bach or Mozart. I have encountered this dozens of times. The reasons are not far to seek. Schubert died young and for all the appreciation of his intimate circle of friends he was undervalued in his own lifetime and for at least a century more because he failed to achieve public recognition and financial success. He was the first great composer in Western music to live by his art alone, without patronage, and he enjoyed only one public concert of his music in the whole of his life. When he died at the age of thirtyone his friend Franz Grillparzer, saddened and well-intentioned but misguided, wrote this epitaph, "Music has buried here great riches but far fairer hopes".  Those words remain on Schubert's tombstone and perpetuate what I see as an astonishingly durable misconception; the myth that Schubert never achieved complete maturity because he died young and that he failed to reach the level of the greatest masters. Schubert's reputation also suffered from the fact that he did things differently and when a work of art is new and different and the world cannot categorise or label it, it often takes a long time for the public to understand and accept what that work has to offer. In some ways these things haunt Schubert's reputation even today. To complicate the picture still further, Schubert lived, and in some ways his music continues to live, under the shadow of Beethoven. Schubert himself asked the question "Wer vermag nach Beethoven noch etwas zu machen?" (Who would dare to do anything after Beethoven?). The answer, of course, was Franz Peter Schubert and most notably in the music that he wrote after Beethoven's death. I know from my own experience that films of this kind frequently work at their best when they are helping people to discover for themselves things which they feel they really knew already. And so, if Schubert is indeed undervalued while so many people are so touched by his music, this film may serve a very good purpose. It does not focus on Schubert's life or career, however. Instead, it uses Schubert's words and music to try and help the viewer to feel closer to what the composer himself felt that he was trying to say. The film begins with the funeral of Beethoven, at which Schubert was a torch-bearer, and the story is told almost entirely in music that Schubert wrote in the twenty months that remained to him after that date, together with quotations from his letters and diaries and the words that he chose to set in some of his songs. 
Our title, The Greatest Love and the Greatest Sorrow, is drawn from a dream which Schubert wrote down on the 3 July, 1822 and which is quoted in full in the film.