Beethoven Frieze (plate 5, center wall): The Hostile Powers

Facing you at the centre of the end wall squats Typhoeus, the giant of Greek myth, painted by Klimt as an enormous ape with pale staring eyes and a mouth of blunt teeth. To one side stand his daughters, the three Gorgons, naked, with snakes coiling through their black hair. Above them, half hidden, are the gaunt faces that Klimt's programme calls Sickness, Madness and Death. On the other side are Lust, Unchastity and Intemperance, the last a heavy woman wrapped from the hips down in patterned cloth. This was the wall that caused the uproar in 1902. Critics wrote of painted pornography, and of images of madness and fixed ideas. In the programme, the floating figures of human longing pass over the heads of all of them on their way to the right wall.