Direction
Christopher Nupen
Production
An ALLEGROTM Film

Winner of the Czech Crystal Award, Prague 1994, Candidate at Banff 1994
United Kingdom, 1993, 80′, English

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 world 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. And so 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.
The film does not focus on Schubert’s life or career, 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. Our title, The Greatest Love and the Greatest Sorrow, is drawn from a prophetic dream which Schubert wrote down on the 3 July, 1822 and which is quoted in full in the film.