Beethoven Frieze (plate 2, left wall): Yearning for Happiness

The plan behind this wall is older than the frieze by more than half a century. Richard Wagner, who conducted Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in Dresden in 1846, wrote about it for that audience as the soul's struggle for joy against a hostile power. Klimt's frieze for the Secession's 1902 Beethoven exhibition follows Wagner's reading of the symphony wall by wall. This section, at four and a half metres the widest on the left wall, holds only the first stage, the longing. Look along the top edge and you'll find the same pair of figures twice, a woman framed by a ring of brown hair with her arms stretched forward, and beside her a sleeping head in gold, repeated almost exactly further on, like a phrase returning in music. Everything beneath them is bare mortar.