The Beethoven Frieze

One of the highlights of our trip to Vienna for me was the opportunity to visit a place deeply important to me personally and professionally as a cultural historian, the Secession museum. Situated between the Opera and the Naschmarkt (Vienna's answer to the shuk), the Secession has loomed large in my imagination of the city, yet I had never seen it in person before now.

First, a little personal background and historical context. The Secession building was the culmination of a bold project undertaken by the Vienna avant-garde at the end of the 19th century. Like the French artists of preceding decades who broke away from the "academic" schools of art that dominated in the middle of the 19th century, the Secessionists made their reputation in their break from the artistic establishment in Vienna -- Gesellschaft bildender Künstler Österreichs, Künstlerhaus [The Society of Austrian Visual Artists, Kunstlerhaus] -- in 1897. The dominant style of the Kunstlerhaus, as with most establishment visual arts in the 19th century, was Historicism, which also happened to define other forms of design (especially architecture). In 1897, revolting against this dominant mode, artists including Gustav Klimt, Koloman Moser, Joseph Olbrich and others demanded a turn to the modern style of the time, which we usually associate with the various labels including Art Nouveau ("New Art"), Beaux Arts, Jugenstil, and, of course, Secession. Each of these titles more or less describes elaboration on similar themes in different places, especially France, the United States, Germany, and Austria-Hungary, all of which developed their own expression of the style.

The figure most celebrated as central to the Secession movement and its style is, of course, Gustav Klimt. We are all familiar, I imagine, with his classic style, and especially his use of detailed human faces surrounded by elaborate patterns of color and gold leaf -- probably most famous in the (often reproduced) image "The Kiss." Of course the style represented by Klimt's work extended far beyond painting; in fact, the greatest impact of the Secession was probably on design, including shapes and patterns of all sorts of objects from household items, to building details, to buildings themselves, examples of which one my find all over Vienna, Prague and Budapest (each of which had their own form of Secession). One of the most prominent architects and builders in Vienna, Otto Wagner, turned himself from late historicism in his buildings to become a member of the Secession, and his mark on the urban landscape of Vienna is profound and unmistakable.

The building most associated with the Secession, however, is not Wagner's work, but is the work of founding member Joseph Maria Olbrich, a hall designed as the gallery for the work of Secession artists, the Secession Museum. The building was, to say the least, unique for its time: a massive, temple-like structure topped by an effervescent dome of golden leafs, it is surrounded by decorations with classical motifs re-imagined in Secession style. Above the main doors are a trio of gorgons (snake-haired women from Greek myth) whose snake-hair intertwines the words "Mahlerei -- Architektur -- Plastik" (painting, architecture, sculpture). Above them, in huge letters, the motto "Die Zeit Ihre Kunst -- Der Kunst Ihre Freiheit" (To each age its art, to art its freedom) -- which I regard one of the most succinct and magnificent statements about art of all time. Walking around the building one encounters other wonderful little design elements -- a trio of owls on the sides, and of course the delightful little turtles (see post "Wien noch einmal" for a pic) that support massive planters in front. All in all, the building is just wonderful.

But for all its beauty, the building was only part of what I wanted to see. Aside from the building, there is only one other permanent display at the Secession, a series of friezes (really murals, I would say, as they are painted and not in relief) that surround the walls of a lower gallery, the Beethoven Friezes by Klimt. These images were part of the fourteenth Secession exhibition in 1902, devoted to Beethoven and the most famous of all Secession exhibitions, and used to be in the main, upstairs gallery space. They were part of a larger display that originally included a massive, seated sculpture of Beethoven by Max Klinger (not to be confused with Maxwell Klinger, Jamie Farr's crossdressing clerk in MASH). The statue itself is now in Leipzig (I believe), but the Klimt murals were preserved and eventually moved to a lower gallery.

Now before this trip, my main exposure to the Beethoven Frieze was in Karl Schorske's famous book on turn-of-the-century Viennese culture, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna, to this day the most important text on the cultural and intellectual history of that period. And while the book has been a consistent inspiration to me since I was an undergraduate -- in fact, it is probably the book, more than any other one, that made me want to do what I do for a living -- the images of the Beethoven Frieze that it contains are anything BUT compelling. They are included as part of a larger chapter on Klimt, and for reasons that I assume have to do with publishing constraints, the only images of the Beethoven Friezes are these pretty shabby black-and-white images (there may have also been a color plate, but I don't remember just now). They never blew me away, that's for sure, and although I appreciated their importance as part of Klimt's ouevre, I was always much more interested in his other work, especially his portraits and landscapes.

So when Toby and I couldn't get in to the Secession on Sunday as planned, I really didn't give much thought to going back. I figured that I had seen what I came for, as the current exhibitions were not of much interest to me. But on Tuesday, we found ourselves once again in the neighborhood of the Secession, the doors were open this time, and I once again wondered whether perhaps it might be worthwhile to go see the Beethoven friezes. After walking past the building to the Naschmarkt, then back, I decided that it would be a mistake not to go.

And I was right. For the most part, the current Secession is used for exhibitions of contemporary artists, and the friezes have been removed (in rather bad taste, if you ask me) to a dedicated space downstairs. (Interestingly, the museum directors seem to know what the actual draw is -- there are two admissions charges, one for the upstairs exhibits and one for the Beethoven friezes -- and the second one is more expensive!)

Paying our entry fee (8.50 Euro! Yikes!), Toby and I went in, and wandered downstairs. The building is quite spare in the interior design department. Walking down the stairs, we found a large-scale cutaway model of the museum, which was quite interesting. But it was upon walking through the doorway to the room that held the friezes that I realized it was worth every Euro cent.

I've heard many times that one can't really appreciate major artworks without seeing them in an unmediated setting. Books and posters and other reproductions just don't cut it. And while I'd generally agree that this is true in a technical sense -- you can't have a very good sense of Monet's "Waterlilies" without seeing how big it is, for instance. Yet I'd never really had the sense of an emotional difference -- that is, that I was somehow moved more deeply by encountering an actual piece of art. Well, maybe once, when I saw a Van Gogh "Sunflowers" for the first time in the British Museum when I was 17.

This was different. The friezes -- really four distinct tableaus which progress in a narrative around the room -- were magnificent in person. Although I can't really convey the power of the entire work here, I'll post here the images in order. The basic idea of the friezes is to graphically represent the music of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 (here is a sample -- Lenny Bernstein and the Vienna Philharmonic -- skip to about minute 3.37 for the music -- for those who aren't familiar), known most widely for its setting to music Schiller's chillingly beautiful poem, "An der Freude," "Ode to Joy" (here is the text in German and English of the Schiller poem -- it's worth reading and savoring). Klimt imagines the progress of the symphony as an existential description of both the be conflict tween despair and joy in the individual psyche and of on the scale of the human experience writ large. The first image is of a knight being urged forward by frail human forms, weak and pleading for a champion in the struggle against despair. The second image, actually the largest and most elaborate of the four, is a panel depicting all of the sources of pain and despair in the human experience, represented by a large hairy beast, Typhoeus, a winged gorilla surrounded by gorgons on the one hand representing sickness, madness and death, and on the other by female forms representing lasciviousness, wantonness, intemperance. Moving on to the third image, after this monstrous tableau, one finds a solitary female figure, carrying a lyre, representing the glimmer of hope for the triumph of joy through art. Finally, in the last and, in my opinion, most magnificent tableau (see image at top of post), a choir of Klimt-ian angels sing in ecstasy as a couple embrace, having realized the transcendent joy of love.

Even as I write these words, I'm getting choked up. It was this last image that really hit me most profoundly -- the perfect balance of the angels and the embracing couple, the complete resolution of pain and suffering through universal love. Not love tied to any ideology, not some hackneyed religious or political ideal or what have you, but simple beauty, the beauty of a private moment of unmediated love between a couple, so profound as if to shape the cosmos and the angels themselves.

I can easily say it was the first time I have really felt so alive in seeing a work of art in person. It was a welcome change of feeling, a ray of hope even in a city of so much heavy history and sadness. I've never been a tremendous Klimt fan (I've always found the commercialization of his work to be a bit much), but I have to admit that at that moment, I felt he had gotten it right in a way few are ever able to do.