BBC4
Ludwig was notably eccentric in ways that made serving as
Bavaria's head of state problematic. He disliked large public functions and
avoided formal social events whenever possible, preferring a life of seclusion
that he pursued with various creative projects. He last inspected a military parade
on 22 August 1875 and last gave a Court banquet on 10 February 1876. His mother
had foreseen difficulties for Ludwig when she recorded her concern for her
extremely introverted and creative son who spent much time day-dreaming. These
idiosyncrasies, combined with the fact that Ludwig avoided Munich and
participating in the government there at all costs, caused considerable tension
with the king's government ministers, but did not cost him popularity among the
citizens of Bavaria. The king enjoyed traveling in the Bavarian countryside and
chatting with farmers and labourers he met along the way. He also delighted in
rewarding those who were hospitable to him during his travels with lavish
gifts. He is still remembered in Bavaria as Unser Kini, which means "our
cherished king" in the Bavarian dialect.
Ludwig also used his personal fortune (supplemented annually
from 1873 by 270,000 marks from the Welfenfonds[20]) to fund the construction
of a series of elaborate castles. In 1867 he visited Eugène Viollet-le-Duc's
work at Pierrefonds, and the Palace of Versailles in France, as well as the
Wartburg near Eisenach in Thuringia, which largely influenced the style of
their construction. In his letters, Ludwig marvelled at how the French had
magnificently built up and glorified their culture (e.g., architecture, art,
and music) and how miserably lacking Bavaria was in comparison. It became his
dream to accomplish the same for Bavaria. These projects provided employment
for many hundreds of local labourers and artisans and brought a considerable
flow of money to the relatively poor regions where his castles were built.
Figures for the total costs between 1869 and 1886 for the building and
equipping of each castle were published in 1968: Schloß Neuschwanstein 6,180,047
marks; Schloß Linderhof 8,460,937 marks (a large portion being expended on the
Venus Grotto); Schloß Herrenchiemsee (from 1873) 16,579,674 marks In order to
give an equivalent for the era, the British Pound sterling, being the monetary
hegemon of the time, had a fixed exchange rate (based on the gold standard) at
£1 = 20.43 Goldmarks.
In 1868, Ludwig commissioned the first drawings for two of
his buildings. The first was Schloss Neuschwanstein, or "New Swan on the
Rock castle", a dramatic Romanesque fortress with soaring fairy-tale
towers situated on an Alpine crag above Ludwig's childhood home, Castle
Hohenschwangau (approximately, "High Swan Region"). Hohenschwangau
was a medieval knights' castle which his parents had purchased. Ludwig reputedly
had spied the location and conceived of building a castle there while still a
boy. The second was Herrenchiemsee, a replica of the palace at Versailles,
which was sited on the "Herren" Island in the middle of Lake
Chiemsee, and was built as a monument to Ludwig's admiration for Louis XIV of
France, the magnificent "Sun King." Only the central portion of the
palace was built; all construction halted on Ludwig's death. Herrenchiemsee
comprises 8,366
square feet , a "copy in miniature" compared
with Versailles' 551,112
ft² .
The following year, Ludwig finished the construction of the
royal apartment in the Residenz Palace in Munich, to which he had added an
opulent conservatory or winter garden on the palace roof. It was started in
1867 as quite a small structure, but after extensions in 1868 and 1871, the
dimensions reached 69.5mx17.2mx9.5m high. It featured an ornamental lake
complete with skiff, a painted panorama of the Himalayas as a backdrop, an
Indian fisher-hut of bamboo, a Moorish kiosk, and an exotic tent. The roof was
a technically advanced metal and glass construction. The winter garden was
closed in June 1886, partly dismantled the following year and demolished in
1897.
In 1869, Ludwig oversaw the laying of the cornerstone for
Schloss Neuschwanstein on a breathtaking mountaintop site. The walls of
Neuschwanstein are decorated with frescoes depicting scenes from the legends
used in Wagner's operas, including Tannhäuser, Tristan und Isolde, Lohengrin,
Parsifal, and the somewhat less than mystic Meistersinger.
After plans for a monumental festival theatre for Wagner's
opera in Munich were thwarted by Court opposition, he supported the
construction in 1872-76 of the Festspielhaus in the town of Bayreuth (Bayreuth
Opera Festival Theatre), and attended the dress rehearsal and third public
performance of the complete Ring Cycle in 1876.
In 1878, construction was completed on Ludwig's Schloss
Linderhof, an ornate palace in neo-French Rococo style, with handsome formal
gardens. The grounds contained a Venus grotto lit by electricity, where Ludwig
was rowed in a boat shaped like a shell. After seeing the Bayreuth
performances, Ludwig had built in the forest near Linderhof Hunding's Hut
(Hundinghütte) (based on the stage set of the first act of Wagner's Die
Walküre) complete with an artificial tree and a sword embedded in it. In Die
Walküre, Siegfried's father Siegmund, pulls the sword from the tree. Hunding's
Hut was destroyed in 1945 but a replica was constructed at Linderhof in 1990. In 1877 a small hermitage
(Einsiedlei des Gurnemanz) as in the third act of Wagner's Parsifal was erected
near Hunding's Hut, with a meadow of spring flowers, where the king would
retire to read. (A replica made in 2000 can now be seen in the park at
Linderhof.) Nearby a Moroccan House, purchased at the Paris World Fair in 1878,
was erected alongside the mountain road. Sold in 1891 and taken to
Oberammergau, it was purchased by the government in 1980 and re-erected in the
park at Linderhof after extensive restoration. Inside the palace, iconography
reflected Ludwig's fascination with the absolutist government of Ancien Régime
France. Ludwig saw himself as the "Moon King", a romantic shadow of
the earlier "Sun King", Louis XIV of France. From Linderhof, Ludwig
enjoyed moonlit sleigh rides in an elaborate eighteenth-century sleigh,
complete with footmen in eighteenth century livery. Also in 1878, construction
began on his Versailles-derived Herrenchiemsee.
In the 1880s, Ludwig'’s plans proceeded undeterred. He
planned the construction of a new castle on Falkenstein ("Falcon
Rock") near Pfronten in the Allgäu (a place he knew well: a diary entry
for 16 October 1867 reads "Falkenstein wild, romantic" The first
design was a sketch by Christian Jank in 1883 "very much like the Townhall
of Liege" (Kreisel 1954, p. 82). Subsequent designs showed a modest villa
with a square tower (Dollmann 1884) and a small Gothic castle (Schultze 1884,
Hofmann 1886). a Byzantine palace in the Graswangtal and a Chinese summer
palace by the Plansee in Tyrol. By 1885, a road and water supply had been provided
at Falkenstein but the old ruins remained untouched; the other projects never
got beyond initial plans.
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