Beethoven Frieze: 1902

The Beethoven Frieze is a three-part mural, painted for the fourteenth Secession exhibition to honor the acquisition of Max Klinger’s sculpture, “Beethoven,” considered by the artists to be the greatest sculpture of the time. The exhibition was pulled together to decorate the room without pay, just to welcome the sculpture to the building. The Frieze, painted by Klimt, is 90 feet long, three sides all representational and based on Richard Wagner’s interpretation of Beethoven’s IX Symphony.
The first panel is entitled “Yearning for Happiness,” and depicts the following scenes:
“Sufferings of Weak Humanity”
“Their Pleas to the Well-Armed Strongman”
“Mercy and Ambition”
These are the internal forces urging the knight to fight for happiness.
The second panel depicts “The Hostile Powers”—The Giant Typhoeus (monster) and the “Three Gorgons” (his daughters), “Sickness, Madness, Death,” “Voluptuousness, Debauchery and Wantonness,” “Gnawing Grief,” and “The Longing and Aspirations of Humanity Pass Overhead.”
In the third panel, the longing for happiness is fulfilled by “Poetry”: “Ideal Kingdom,” “True Happiness, Pure Bliss and Absolute Love,” and “Heavenly Choir.”
The extreme two-dimensionality of the beings, as in much of Klimt’s earlier works, forces a shift from real to conceptual. The forms play out the story of how art conquers adversity. Some of the figures depicted are classical characters, but many are simply as we picture them in our imaginations—death, sickly and disgusting, the shining knight, and the heavenly “desires of mankind.”

"Three Gorgons"

“True Happiness, Pure Bliss and Absolute Love,” and “Heavenly Choir.”