Bavaria’s fairytale king is famous for his fantastic castles, but his patronage of composer Richard Wagner remains his greatest legacy
Words GREG KING
One was tall, thin, a boyish 18 and almost feminine in his beauty; the other was 51, stooped, his face marked by decades of financial hardship. As they stood beneath an immense crystal chandelier in Munich’s Residenz Palace that May of 1864, both were overwhelmed – the younger at meeting his hero, the older at this unbelievable turn of events. The awkwardness of this first meeting between King Ludwig II of Bavaria and composer Richard Wagner soon grew into an adoring, frustrating, bitter and worshipful relationship that changed history.
Ludwig had come to the Bavarian throne only two months earlier, a shy, aloof young man, given to dreamy fantasies. He passed hours sitting alone in darkened rooms, talking to himself. “I am not bored at all,” he explained to a concerned courtier. “I like to imagine all sorts of things.”
Above all, he was obsessed with Teutonic legends: evocative frescoes of Lohengrin, the Swan Knight, Medieval cavalcades and romantic ladies adorned the walls of his father’s Hohenschwangau Castle in the Alps.
At 15, his parents reluctantly allowed him to attend a performance of Wagner’s opera Lohengrin. Ludwig saw his youthful fantasies brought to life on stage; a few months later, during a performance of Tannhäuser, he was so overwhelmed that a servant thought he was having a seizure. Ludwig had no ear for music: rather, in Wagner’s operas he had discovered intoxicating and bewitching ways to experience the sagas of his youth.
While young Ludwig dreamed, Richard Wagner worried. In 1842, after what seemed a constant flight from creditors in Germany, Russia and France, he had been appointed Kapellmeister to the king of Saxony. Dresden witnessed the premieres of his Rienzi, Der fliegende Holländer and Tannhäuser.
But in 1848, as revolution swept Europe, Wagner hurled himself into radical politics and led marches against the Saxon government. After a warrant was issued for his arrest, the composer abandoned his wife, Minna, and fled to Switzerland. By 1863, kept in exile by threatened lawsuits and working only fitfully on the operas of his later great cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen, Wagner faced a grim future. “Will a Prince ever be found,” he asked in despair, “who will enable me to produce my works?”
Wagner didn’t know it, but on coming to the throne, Bavaria’s Ludwig II had ordered officials to find the composer. Franz von Pfistermeister, the king’s secretary, finally located Wagner hiding from his cre
