Beethoven Frieze (plate 8, right wall): Yearning for happiness is assuaged in poetry

When the exhibition opened in April 1902, Gustav Mahler, then director of the Vienna Court Opera, conducted a passage from the last movement of Beethoven's Ninth, arranged for wind instruments. This wall answers that music. The frieze ends on lines Schiller wrote and Beethoven set in that movement, joy, bright spark of the gods, and this kiss to the whole world. First a column of floating women rises in gold, the arts that in Klimt's programme lead into an ideal realm. Next to them stands a choir of angels from paradise, women in pink patterned robes with their eyes closed and their hands raised to their chests. At the far end a naked couple embrace inside a golden arch, the man seen from behind, the woman's arms around his neck, their feet wrapped together in a single blue cloth.