King Ludwig II and Wagner
Ludwig II of Bavaria succeeded his father's throne when he was only eighteen, in 1864. He was a Wagner fan ever since he attended a performance of Lohengrin. When he read in Wagner's preface to Rheingold the call for a prince who would finance the dream of a new theatre, Ludwig took the address and decided to act upon it. He had Wagner traced, who was on the run from his creditors and became an enthusiastic patron to the Wagnerian dream. Ludwig was prepared to build Wagner a theatre, though not in some secluded spot but in the residential city of Munich. Ludwig was a sincere admirer of Wagner's opera’s, so the thought of a theatre built especially for the production of those works, held such attraction to him. The young king conceived a huge, monumental and splendid structure. Nothing less than the most magnificent would do (a principle he would later on apply to his elaborate castle-building programme that almost ruined him). Notwithstanding that Wagner was far more realistic in the matter, he nevertheless agreed to the Munich scheme and proposed Semper as the architect. The co-operation with Semper went back to an old plan of Wagner, who had already some time ago convinced the architect to come and live in Switzerland. Now he convinced the king to assign Semper with the Munich design.
Habel points out that the co-operation between these three men was bound to result in a revolutionary design. All three of them declined the superficial culture of contemporary society and held strong feelings against the conventional ways of thinking of the middle-class. Wagner conceived a reformation of society through a renovation of the arts; Semper envisioned a new architecture and Ludwig, already facing assaults on the monarchy, refused to be a king of the people (in fact he tended strongly to absolutism and admired the era of Louis XIV, an attitude out of line with social developments). The three loathed the state of contemporary art and society but they also differed greatly in their particular vision – too much, perhaps, to make the dream they had in common come true. Still, their venture would be the very basis of the later Bayreuth Festspielhaus.
They shared an ideal but it took different shapes in their minds. In the field of architecture, Ludwig held a taste for the abundant and (in fact) for the typical bourgeois – what could be called eclectic kitsch. Wagner and Semper were very different, especially Semper held a progressive view of an architecture based on classical geometry and order, a pure style. In the end, their ideas would prove irreconcilable.
Ludwig loved the theatre for the creation of a fictional, magical world on stage. To him the illusion had to be complete – so too for Wagner, something that could only be achieved by means of the most advanced stage machinery of the nineteenth century. Ludwig embraced with enthusiasm the world created in Wagner music dramas, a world of the great heroes of German mythology. His taste of staging was typically nineteenth century and was the cause of many a row with Wagner (especially when Ludwig started to produce some of Wagner’s works himself). Both men favoured historical accuracy of scenery and costumes but differed greatly on the actual function of the scenery in the performance. Wagner considered stage settings a mere background to the dramatic action. The scenery was important for it was instrumental in creating a perfect illusion on the stage, but it never could be allowed to actually dominate the scene. To Wagner, the acting and singing were the most important vehicles of the performance. Ludwig on the other hand, favoured enormous, beautiful and lavish settings. Only the largest changeable wings of the time, skilfully painted and supported by the most advanced machinery (preferably with a lot of special effects!) could successfully establish the total illusion Ludwig was looking for in the theatre. It was the scenery itself Ludwig was interested in. He even commissioned playwrights to write new plays with their central theme based on the court-life and society of the French King Louis XIV, in order to produce them with the most extravagant scenery depicting that era. Ludwig strongly admired the autocratic world of Louis XIV. The Bavarian king had productions staged in his castles only for himself – a big contrast to Wagner’s conception of the theatrical experience as a congregation of audience and performers. Ludwig’s art was, in a way, a celebration of absolutism. To him, Wagner’s music, the illusionary world of the theatre, his huge fairy-tale castles were all just a way to escape reality. The king wanted to be drowned in the theatrical illusion. The real world he loathed; he refused to be a king of commoners. The creation of beautiful illusions carried him back to what he conceived to be the great eras of humanity. On May 3rd, 1867, he wrote to Cosima Wagner: ‘I look forward to dream myself into a different, more beautiful world; because the world, the spirit, the times, that rule today, is horrible, the people so awful, diseased by the pestulent ideas of the New Era (…)’ (in: Petzet, 1970, 298). Whenever Ludwig produced Wagner’s work, it caused much dissatisfaction between them because Wagner couldn’t agree with Ludwig’s bombastic taste.
When Ludwig forced Wagner to turn over the scores of Siegfried and Die Walküre, the first two parts of the Ring-tetralogy, and produced them against Wagner’s will, the contention reached a climax and they parted.
Later on, in 1874, after ignoring Wagner’s cries for financial help, Ludwig ultimatly saved the Festival Theatre by granting Wagner another loan. Ludwig would attend the first Ring-cycle in 1876, but never return to Bayreuth again.
In the 1880’s, he almost caused the state of Bavaria to go bankrupt and was consequently declared insane by some of the members of the Royal Family in 1886. King Ludwig II was arrested and locked up in his castle at Berg. June 13th, 1886, King Ludwig II of Bavaria drowned in the nearby Lake Starnberg during a walk. The circ*mstances of his death have never been sufficiently cleared.
