Royal Babylon (25 page)

Ludwig thought long and hard about doing his duty by his country and providing it with an heir, and very nearly did something about it. He went so far as to announce his engagement to Princess Sophie, sister of his lifelong friend the Austrian Empress Elisabeth, but as the wedding day approached Ludwig panicked and, rather like a schoolboy begging his mother for a note to excuse him from sports, he persuaded his
court doctor to produce a certificate stating that the King was unfit to marry. When Ludwig's court secretary, Lorenz von Düflipp, made a last-ditch appeal to the King to see it through, Ludwig replied, ironically, that he would rather drown. This was to be Ludwig's sole attempt at a relationship with a woman: after the broken engagement Ludwig became overtly misogynous, and even banned all females from the vicinity of his palace.

News of Ludwig's rejection of the Princess Sophie and the sudden and unexpected breakdown of the royal engagement caused quite a sensation. Thirty years later, poor Sophie hit the headlines for the last time when she strayed too near an unguarded gas lamp at a charity bazaar in Paris and became identifiable only by her dental chart.

         

King Ludwig II's reign can be roughly divided into two parts, each dominated by an irrational and ultimately destructive obsession. The first of these resulted in one of the oddest and most intense royal patronages ever known. In his early teens, Ludwig developed a fascination for the composer Richard Wagner. The young Prince found Wagner's fantasy world of operatic medieval legend much more interesting than the real world he lived in. In the giant structures of Wagner's operas, and later of Christopher Jank's castles, Ludwig retreated into a cloud-cuckoo-land of myths and legend, of Tolkienesque giants and gods.

It was a complicated obsession, for Ludwig was completely fixated by both Wagner the man and his works. Wagner at this
time was living in obscurity and hiding from his creditors, lurching from one financial crisis to the next. His life had reached such a low ebb that he had considered suicide. As soon as Ludwig heard that Wagner was broke and in danger of being thrown into debtors prison, he rushed to his rescue. The King had long been looking for an excuse to meet his hero. When the King's secretary, Pfistmeister, came knocking at Wagner's door, the middle-aged composer could hardly believe his good fortune.

It was an unlikely alliance. The King was eighteen years old and homosexual; Wagner was about twice his age and a notorious womanizer—one of his more famous affairs was with Franz Liszt's illegitimate daughter, Cosima von Bülow, a girl twenty-four years his junior. Wagner wasn't the easiest of men to get along with and was notoriously sensitive to criticism: he often invited his friends to listen to his new work and to offer their opinions, but his friends soon found out that a less than enthusiastic response was likely to earn them a punch in the mouth. Ludwig was hardly a great music lover; in fact his interest in music was exclusively Wagnerian.

The impulsive young King treated Wagner with incredible generosity. He began by handing over huge gifts of cash to clear Wagner's backlog of debts. Once the debts were settled, it became clear that Wagner's muse required him to live in a state of permanent luxury, including a rent-free house in Munich and an annual salary of 4,000 gulden, far more than many of Ludwig's most senior government ministers could expect to earn. Ludwig was prepared to bankroll Wagner's every whim. He put up the money for many of his most famous and extravagant works, staged his operas in Munich and built for his exclusive use the first model opera house, the Festival Theatre at Bayreuth.

Wagner's apparently limitless greed and his life of opulence made him unpopular. The increasingly hostile Bavarian press depicted him as a sinister old charlatan whose hold over the young King was bleeding the country dry. Ludwig's ministers, especially his chief minister, Baron von der Pfordten, were horrified by the one-way flow of large amounts of money straight out of the Bavarian treasury and into Wagner's back pocket.

Ludwig's sexuality inevitably raises questions about the relationship between the two men, especially as the correspondence that flowed between the composer and his patron, even allowing for the fashionably sentimental prose of the day, was emotionally charged and could easily be taken for love letters. Ludwig couldn't bear to be parted from his idol for long, and whenever Wagner was away the King pined pathetically for his return. Wagner must have known that his friend was mentally unstable, but he also knew how not to look a gift horse, or in this case a lunatic king, in the mouth.

As the popular clamor against Wagner grew, the King of Bavaria was given an unusual ultimatum by his chief minister: discontinue your relationship with Wagner or lose your crown. Ludwig briefly toyed with the idea of abdicating but quickly caved in to public opinion. As the composer left for exile in Switzerland, Ludwig wrote to him, “My love for you will never die, and I beg you to retain forever your friendship for me.”

Years later Wagner confessed that he was as mystified by Ludwig's attentions as anyone else—in his opinion Ludwig hadn't a clue about opera or any sort of music. Wagner, it seemed, had somehow hit upon the formula for becoming extremely popular with megalomaniac German rulers. One of
Adolf Hitler's most cherished possessions was a letter written by Wagner's royal patron.

King Ludwig then threw himself into a new passion. It was one that was to earn him immortality, but which in the short term threatened to wreck the Bavarian economy, and ultimately became his downfall. The building urge occurred in several of the Wittelsbachs. King Ludwig I, although renowned for his personal stinginess, spent public millions on grandiose new building projects in his desire to beautify Munich. His second eldest son, Otto, was another compulsive builder who also enjoyed a brief and eventful career as the first King of Greece. Otto was even more unpopular than the Ottoman Turks. He took up the throne at the age of seventeen and quickly bankrupted the national treasury by turning Athens into a building site. For the best part of thirty years he attempted to rule the locals by pointing Bavarian fixed bayonets in their direction, until in 1862 he and his wife, Queen Amelia, were finally forced to flee back to Bavaria with just a sackful of jewelry. Oddly enough, Otto's reign did leave one enduring legacy, although it was not, as he might have hoped, architectural. One of his Bavarian entourage was a brewer named Fuchs: the Greeks changed the name of his product to Fix and have been drinking to his name ever since.

It was in 1868 that King Ludwig II first began to hatch plans to build a series of fantastic mock-medieval castles. For the last eighteen years of his life, these surreal, artificial palaces were an all-consuming hobby which absolutely nothing was allowed to interfere with, certainly not the Bavarian economy or the small matter of the Franco-Prussian War. Unlike other famous builders, Ludwig didn't put up monuments for personal aggrandizement: he built for sheer escapism and the personal
satisfaction of seeing his irrational whims become reality. These castles came to be known as his “sick children.”

Ludwig started building Neuschwanstein, the smallest but most sensational of his castles, on an inaccessible Bavarian peak in 1869. Neuschwanstein is now at least as much a picture-postcard cliché as London's Tower Bridge and is possibly the most photographed building in the world. He eccentrically gave the job of designing it not to an architect, but to his court scene-painter, Christopher Jank. The mysterious ivory-white castle with its Romanesque windows, battlements and spindly turrets was a ready-made children's fantasy. Walt Disney used it twice, once when he based his
Sleeping Beauty
castle on it, and again in his film
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
.

Work began on Linderhof, Ludwig's homage to his idol, King Louis XIV, the following year. It was a giant villa, complete with an artificial grotto furnished with cast-iron stalactites coated in cement. It has an underground lake fed by a waterfall, colored lighting and artificial waves created by machinery. On the waters floated a boat shaped like a cockleshell. The King liked to sail across it dressed in his famous swan-motif armor.

Herrenchiemsee, built on an island in the middle of Lake Chiemsee, was intended as a Bavarian version of the Palace of Versailles, but Ludwig didn't live long enough to see it finished. Unlike his previous creations, Herrenchiemsee was a folly, an expensive private joke. Many of the rooms in the great horizontal building were never meant to be lived in—they were empty shells hidden behind a surreal facade. Ludwig planned to build many more castles. His next project was to have been at Falkenstein, and the plans left behind by Jank show it to be
even more fantastic than the others. But Ludwig ran out of money.

Part of the fun of being mad was that you didn't have to worry about the bill. The King treated Bavaria's treasury as though it was a private kitty which existed to fund his building program. The total sum expended on his three castles alone was about 31 million marks. Of this, 7.5 million marks were his personal debt. These were tiny, insignificant amounts of money in comparison to the castles' earnings for Bavarian tourism since then, but in the 1870s they were quite enough to make the veins stand out on his finance minister's forehead. The Bavarian cabinet convened to tactfully put it to the King, as a cholesterol-conscious doctor would to his overweight patient, that he might “cut down” on his castles, but economizing was not a concept that Ludwig was familiar with.

         

Ludwig's mental condition, meanwhile, began to deteriorate, and his behavior became more markedly aberrant. The hallucinations that had afflicted him since childhood became more frequent, as did the voices in his head. Ludwig would often ask his servants where the voices had come from. The servants learned to humor him and would apologize for making the noises. Like his father, he was plagued by violent headaches. Ludwig's headaches, however, tended to coincide with days when protocol demanded his presence at some important court function, or when he was obliged to meet a visiting head of state.

As the years went by, the King's barely concealed disdain for government and affairs of state became embarrassingly conspicuous. He was never around when his ministers needed him, and he went out of his way to make sure that they couldn't track him down. He once vanished for a secret meeting with Wagner on the eve of war. When war finally broke out, after his ministers had spent days desperately scouring Bavaria in an attempt to find him, their precious Commander-in-Chief resurfaced to explain that he was terribly sorry but he had been engrossed in a really good fireworks display—he was sure they would understand.

Ludwig was disinterested in international affairs, especially the Franco-Prussian War, which he was supposed to be fighting on Prussia's side. As a military man he was less than convincing. He hated warfare and was contemptuous of anything to do with it. Nothing could persuade him to even take time out to visit his troops. Once he saw a tired-looking sentry outside his palace and had a sofa sent out for the man to lie on.

Ludwig was familiar with his family history of mental instability and feared for his own sanity. One day he was seen staring into a mirror, shaking his head and muttering, “Really, there are times when I wouldn't swear that you are not mad.” He was notoriously touchy about remarks on his mental health. Whenever news of the King's eccentricities leaked out to the press, Ludwig threatened to imprison any editor who dared to put them into print. The ban extended to any mention of his brother Otto, who by 1876 had become certifiably insane.

Ludwig's increased withdrawal from the real world more or less coincided with his brother's confinement. The King became almost completely reclusive. He built his own church at Berg so that he could hear Mass alone. Considerably more
eccentric were his private command performances at the Hof and Residenz Theatres in Munich. Between 1871 and 1885 he commanded over 200 private performances of his favorite plays. During these eerie events he would recline alone in his royal box above the empty auditorium, occasionally heckling.

He ate alone, but always had dinners prepared for three or four persons so that he didn't feel lonely. Once he invited his favorite horse to dinner, and watched silently as the gray mare wrecked his dining room. Ludwig developed a fixation about the French Bourbon kings and liked to pretend that he was in the company of his heroes, Louis XIV and Louis XV, and their mistresses, Madame de Pompadour and Madame de Maintenon, occasionally making conversation with his imaginary guests in broken French. He became so obsessed with the legend of the Sun King that he took to imitating his walk and his handwriting and forging his signature. On his nightly excursions in winter through the snowbound countryside, his attendants were obliged to wear Louis XIV period costume.

He slept by day and lived by night. He had artificial moons installed in his bedrooms under which he and his lover Prince Paul von Thurn und Taxis would cavort dressed as Barbarossa and Lohengrin. The King's nocturnal jaunts in the valleys of the Bavarian alps in his fantastically gilded, rococo horse-drawn sleigh were legend. In the depths of winter he occasionally found himself caught in a blizzard and would seek refuge in a peasant's hut in the middle of the night—a never-to-be-forgotten experience for his surprised hosts. Weirder yet were his regular nocturnal trips around the Court Riding School in Munich. He rode his horses round in circles all night. Ludwig would pretend that he was traveling, for example to Augsburg,
then calculate how many laps round the riding-school perimeter it would take to cover the equivalent distance. At the halfway point of his theoretical trip, he would stop to take refreshment, then remount his horse and complete the journey.

Meanwhile, Ludwig was showing other, more dangerous, signs of mental instability. Working for the King became increasingly hazardous for his servants. He imposed a code of conduct that made their daily routine almost impossible. The slightest offense would provoke severe punishment. Ludwig was a big man and often he would lash out at his servants with his own hands and feet. He ordered that one servant be transported for life for failing to catch a bird that had escaped from the royal aviary; another was ordered to wear a dress and ride around the palace on a donkey. Ludwig despised all forms of imperfection: an ugly valet was found guilty of accidentally making eye contact with the King as he passed him in a corridor, and was made to wear a black hood over his face whenever he was in the presence of the King for more than a year. The hood, Ludwig explained to a bemused guest, was “so that I don't see his criminal countenance.”