Beethoven Frieze (plate 4, left wall): Yearning for Happiness

When the frieze passed to the Austrian state in 1972, it had spent 70 years off its wall, in storage and on the move. Restorers from the Federal Monuments Office worked on it for about ten years and finished in 1985, the year before it went back into the Secession. Klimt left the lower part of this section as bare mortar, and it still carries a web of fine cracks. Along the top the floating figures pick up the story from the neighbouring panel, where a kneeling naked couple, standing for suffering humanity, begs an armoured knight for help. In the Belvedere's reading, the ones here take up those pleas and carry them onward, towards the hostile powers on the end wall. The last of them reaches both arms towards the edge of the panel.