My Letters from Ludwig: A Novel About King Ludwig Ii of Bavaria

By C. Robert Holloway

While apprenticing backstage at Richard Wagners legendary Festival Theatre in Bayreuth, Germany, C. R. Holloway happens onto a handwritten note purporting to be from King Ludwig II. If real, its allegations are so slanderous, they would further stain Wagners and Ludwigs already sullied reputations, and outrage their descendents and admirers.
Reluctant to inform anyone of his discovery, Holloway hides the note inside the lining of his luggage and, on returning home to Honolulu, stows it in a safety deposit box, hoping eventually to find time to verify its genesis and authenticity. Shortly, his Waikiki postman delivers a letter in which its writer demands the found note be destroyed immediately. Written in a hand identical to the original, it is signed by someone claiming to be Ludwig, himself!
Soon, a series of revealing letters arrive from Ludwig in which he becomes increasingly more hostile toward Holloway and proportionately less self-recriminatory. Concurrent with the arrival of these letters, Holloways life takes a bizarre and disquieting turn that includes his phone being tapped, frequent nightmares and surprise visitors from Germany.
All of which energizes his determination to return to Bavaria, surreptitiously investigate Ludwigs world and prowl his castles in search of the truth about the tortured life and mysterious death of The Mad King. While a paying guest of the Hohenlohes, a wealthy family of nobility in Munich, Holloway becomes involved with their nineteen-year-old son, Reiger, a strikingly handsome, moody, first year medical student. Their edgy relationship nearly gets the two of them killed.
In the end, Holloways findings are sure to anger Wagnerian purists, infuriate Bavarian bureaucrats, startle keepers of Ludwigs flame and give tourists a new perspective while tramping through the Mad Kings Dream Castles.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 27, 2004
• ISBN: 9781462814619

Book preview

MY LETTERS FROM LUDWIG

A novel about King Ludwig II of Bavaria

C. Robert Holloway

Copyright © 2004 by C. Robert Holloway.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

Overture

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Coda

OVERTURE

For the moment, I felt immensely pleased with myself. There I was, an aspiring opera designer from a small fishing town in southern New Jersey, being given a personal tour of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, the cavernous, acoustically-perfect auditorium designed by Richard Wagner over a century ago to showcase his ‘RING OF THE NIBELUNG’.

All around me dozens of technicians struggled to negotiate massive sets into position for rehearsal of ‘Das Rheingold’. When my guide, Kainz, pointed out the machinery that enabled the Rhine Maidens to soar and dive about, as if swimming under water, I was awestruck.

Kainz, a blonde and azure-eyed medical student from Munich, went on to explain in perfect, unaccented English, how his Father, Grandfather, and Great Grandfather, surgeons all, had worked backstage at Bayreuth during their summer-breaks from medical school, and how honored he felt continuing in their tradition.

Suddenly, I was gasping for breath, but a gulp away from demonstrating the embarrassing dichotomy of tears and euphoria, pride and shame, with which the Gods of Worthiness had cursed me. I felt dizzy and about to faint.

When Kainz asked if I was okay, I nodded ‘yes’, unable to give voice to the opera of self-doubt caterwauling in my head. I motioned for him to continue, but quickly realized I was too nauseous to go on and asked directions to the nearest restroom. Kainz explained that the backstage facilities were undergoing their annual maintenance and directed me toward the lavatory off the main lobby.

I locked myself in one of the stalls, hunkered over the commode, and tried to muffle my not-entirely dry-heaves. Were they the result of the greasy breakfast I’d gobbled down an hour or so before, or the nagging voice of conscience reminding me that I was way out of my league? I had padded my resume a tad and was sure to be found out, denounced as an imposter and cast out of Wagner’s temple.

Whatever the cause, it made me retch to exhaustion.

Later, as I stood at a washstand, furiously scrubbing and re-scrubbing myself, I was startled at the sight of the semi-demonic, tear-streaked face, glaring back from the stainless-steel mirror.

‘Who is this person? And why is he so upset just because I’m about to realize one of my life-long ambitions?’ I struggled in vain for an answer.

Since first hearing Arturo Toscanini conduct ‘Tannhauser’ on an old ‘78’, I had dreamed of visiting Bayreuth. Years later, when friends showed slides of their pilgrimage to the fabled Wagnerian shrine, my dream advanced to an obsession. For the better part of a decade, I vowed that, somehow, someday, I would experience the festival for myself.

Every Spring, from whichever town my work led me, I sent a letter to Wolfgang Wagner, grandson to Richard, in which I sought permission to participate in the annual reworking of his and his brother Weiland’s celebrated staging techniques. I inquired about performance schedules, internships, scholarships, seminars, and the possibility of serving as a stage-hand. Once, in a calculated demonstration of humility, I even offered to work as a janitor.

But never received the courtesy of a reply.

Until I wrote from Honolulu.

One morning, at my Waikiki Towers apartment, I received an envelope with the words, ‘BAYREUTHER FESTSPIELE’ blind-embossed on its upper left corner, bereft of street address or country of origin; elegant in its conceit that the post offices of the world would surely recognize that little village in Northern Bavaria.

I sliced the envelope open carefully. ‘Herr Holloway is hereby granted permission to observe rehearsals starting Monday, July 16th for a period of two weeks. This letter to be presented to Lichtenfeuhrer, Klaus Schmidt at the Technisch Eingang. Ihr erge’ bener, Wolfgang Wagner’

I couldn’t help wondering if Maestro Wagner had extended this treasured invitation knowing Honolulu was about as far from Bayreuth as it was possible to get, and the likelihood of my actually showing up was negligible. Quickly setting my misgivings aside, I booked a charter flight that stopped at Seattle, Bangor, Paris, and finally Frankfurt, where I boarded a train for Nuremberg and another to Bayreuth, and arrived on Saturday evening, July 14th at twilight.

I checked into the moldering-at-the-seams Goldener Anker Hotel, and worried over the placard mounted on the inside of the door, which sounded like something left over from the Third Reich. In German, French and English it warned, ‘It is illegal to have unregistered visitors. All offenders will be fined and are subject to immediate expulsion.’

So much for cruising the coffee houses and music stores and inviting the odd preppie Wagnerphile back to my room for an artistic chat!

Next morning I awakened to the tolling of a hundred church bells, and by 8:30, could be seen striding purposefully toward the Festspielhaus, delighting in the cool, bright light and the patina of the plush green moss adorning the Linden trees along the promenade.

From photographs and lithographs, I had assumed the theatre was constructed of limestone and marble. As I approached the famous edifice, I was surprised to see it was made of half-timbers and brick infill, lending it an oddly English Tudor character.

I’d read that, for more than a decade prior to its unveiling in 1876, Wagner had struggled to raise the funds to build a permanent theatre for his art. Though first intended for Munich, Wagner’s political diatribes and attempts to influence young King Ludwig’s policies, had garnered him the open contempt of many of Bavaria’s politicians and leading figures. Soon enough, Wagner was expelled from Munich and forced to live in exile in Lucerne, Switzerland. Eventually, he was drawn to the quiet village of Bayreuth, whose wise and kindly fathers, with a prescient eye for tourism, deeded him a choice site on a hill at the edge of town.

By 1874, with less than half of the hoped-for pledges in the bank, and despite his architect’s grandiose concepts, Wagner was forced to compromise on what was meant to be a temporary wooden structure.

Now, over a hundred years later, having survived the ravages of time and two world wars, the original edifice still stands, with minor renovations, as home to the most innovative staging techniques in Germany—some say in all the opera world. Every year in late July and August, Bayreuth becomes Valhalla for several thousand Wagnerites, who descend on it from around the world.

I dislike interrupting any adventure to take photographs, but so intriguing were the images I encountered that first Sunday morning, I happily made the exception:

Four flatcars rested on a siding at the Bayreuth station, bearing a dozen Mercedes and Rolls-Royce limousines, purportedly awaiting the arrival of their owner, a Bahranian prince and his retinue. Click.

A highly animated group of Japanese music students stood near the box office discussing the merits of the forthcoming season, in fluent German. Click.

The tantalizing aroma of sizzling pork sausage and onions wafted from the carts of a dozen street vendors. Well dressed crowds queued around them, slathering their sausages with the ubiquitous German mustard, and consuming them by the gross. Click.

The relatively modest clapboard house, just down the hill from the Festpielhaus, originally built to accommodate the overflow of visiting luminaries, belied its notoriety for having been Hitler’s summer headquarters during his many visits in the late 1930’s. After WWII, the building served as a U.S. Army officer’s club, most assuredly setting Wagner and Hitler to spinning in their graves. Click.

The keeper of a Tabak store on the main strasse bragged that he’d never been inside the theatre nor seen an opera! And, yes, he knew about the codicil in Wagner’s will which made it possible for Bayreuthers to purchase dress-rehearsal tickets, in perpetuity, for one German mark. No click.

A striking blonde woman, hair bobbed in a mannish pageboy, leaned against the entrance of a book store. Her immaculately tailored suit and flowing silk scarf gave her the look of haughty disdain as she dragged luxuriantly on a gold-tipped cigarette. Whatever for? she purred in a brandy and tobacco mezzo, when asked if I might take a photo.

Research. Proof how chic German women are. Hi, I’m C. Robert—from Hawaii. I offered my hand and most engaging smile. Would you mind?

‘You Americans are incorrigible,’ she replied, with a bewitching grin and surprisingly firm grip as she shook my hand. ‘It’s Sacha. Sacha Weintraub.’ The gold-leafed sign on the window read: ‘S. Weintraub and Sons.’ On my look, she added, "I spend my summers here, managing the store for my brothers. Now take your picture, quickly. And feel free to buy me a coffee as payment, sometime.’ Tamping out her cigarette in a nearby urn, she struck a theatrical pose, and, on hearing the click of my shutter, disappeared into the bookstore.

After snapping her and dozens of others, I fell into bed early that evening so as to be de-jet-lagged in preparation for whatever was expected of me Monday morning. As always, when excited about a new adventure, I slept fitfully, and woke up hourly to check the clock, hardly able to contain myself.

I arose with the early dawn, showered, wolfed down a huge breakfast from the hotel buffet and headed for the theatre. At 8:00 am promptly, I presented Wolfgang Wagner’s letter at the Technisch Eingang, had my name checked off a clipboard list, was issued a temporary visitor’s badge, and informed that Klaus Schmidt, the lighting designer, was extremely busy, but would try to meet me later in the day.

That’s when Kainz stepped forward, introduced himself and shortly commenced our backstage tour.

§

Now, as I left the men’s room, I noticed an archway framing a dimly lighted alcove, at the end of which loomed an unmarked door. Discovering it was unlocked, I looked inside where a carpeted staircase led up to what must be the private boxes. Since there were no Verbieten signs, I rationalized that the opportunity for some unauthorized exploration was presenting itself. I closed the door, first making sure its mechanism couldn’t lock behind me, shucked my boots and climbed the stairs.

The top of the landing opened onto a crescent-shaped corridor with curtained-off doorways arranged symmetrically along one side of its gray walls. Two exit lights cast an eerie phosphorescence across the opposing wall, reminding me of a photographer’s dark-room. The red glow made it nearly impossible to decipher the tiny numbered plaques mounted above each door. I wondered which one had been Wagner’s, then had a creepier thought. Which one had Hitler used? I figured they were probably one and the same.

Clutching my boots in my left hand, I traced the wall with my right and tip-toed along the parquet floor. Inching past L-7, L-6, L-5, L-4, L-3, I froze when I looked up at the door between L-2 and R-2. The initials ‘RW’, stared down at me in their hand-carved, stark majesty.

‘Oh, my God!’, I blurted out and shivered at the draft that had pursued me up the stairs. I parted the curtains to reveal a pitch-black space, remembered the tiny flashlight in my Aloha Airlines key ring and snapped it on to reveal six dowdy armchairs crowding the cubicle. Opposite the entry, a curtain hung to just below the wainscoted railing, it’s hem traced by the ambient light of the auditorium beyond. I knelt down and crept on all fours toward the curtain, afraid my slightest movement might be noticed by Wolfgang’s staff seated at a long table in the center of the auditorium, or by one of the technicians on stage.

I collided with a chair and prayed that the celebrated acoustics weren’t working in reverse as I reached for the center of the curtains. Taking care to keep them overlapped, I separated the fabric just enough to glimpse the right side of the theatre. A heart-stopping sight greeted me—reinforced by knowing this must have been exactly how Wagner first viewed his creation more than a century ago!

From somewhere down the hallway I heard the slam of a distant door, then the clickety-clack of footsteps rapidly approaching. Panicked, I turned off the flash-light, pulled the nearest chair close to me and wedged myself into the niche beneath the railing and at the last second, remembered to grab my boots.

The entry curtains snapped open, affording me a strobe-like glimpse of a conservatively-dressed, middle-aged woman. After looking about furtively, she stepped in, yanked the curtains closed, and leaned against the wall while catching her breath.

I was searching for a suitable alibi to explain my presence, when I heard another door open and close at the other end of the corridor, followed by the sound of heavy footsteps coming toward us. ‘Thank God I just peed!’ I thought.

For no explainable reason, a long-ago lesson from Army basic-training about the human eye being very reflective, leapt to mind. Our drill-sargeant had instructed us, ‘In night combat, when the enemy gets close enough to see the white of your eyes, look away.’ At long last, here was a chance to test Sargeant Rivera’s theory, which I did, just as the curtains were yanked open and closed a second time.

There followed the sounds of a clumsy embrace, and a torrent of impassioned whispering, entirely in German, most of which I couldn’t understand. From what I could decipher, Herr wanted Frau to do something she was reluctant to do. When I heard the sound of something being unzipped, followed by slurping and moaning, I knew Frau wasn’t ironing Herr’s shirt.

‘For this I crossed half the world?,’ I thought and kept my face pressed firmly to the wall, holding my breath, as if under water.

Their body heat soon raised the temperature in the box by several degrees.

After what seemed a quarter-hour, Herr hissed at Frau one of the few words I had mastered from the ‘Useful Phrases’ guide during the long flight over.

‘Schnell! Die taschentuch!’

‘Schnell’ meant ‘quick’, of that I was fairly sure, but what the heck was ‘Taschentuch’?

In terse whispers, they helped each other re-button and re-zip, exchanged a mumbled ‘auf Wiederschen,’ and quickly made their separate escapes along the corridor. I figured they must be very important to risk an assignation in so sacred a space. And very horny to accomplish it at nine-fifteen in the morning!

My immediate problem: how to get out of there unobserved? Surely Kainz would be looking for me by now? As I struggled to my feet, I scraped my head on something sharp under the ledge. ‘Ouch!’ When I touched my forehead, a tiny drop of blood appeared on my fingertip. The flashlight revealed its cause: a brass screw protruding from a loose strip of molding. ‘Ouch again!’ That’s when I noticed what looked to be a wad of tissue tucked behind the molding. I pulled the yellowed scrap of paper free and carefully unfolded it to reveal a message written in a broad, cursive hand:

Wer immer dies findet, verdient, die ganze Geschichte zu hören. Nicht nur war ich der Anstoß zu Richard Wagners Opern und der Gründer dieses Hauses—für eine Weile war ich sein Gespiele. Der Beweis findet sich verschlossen in meinen Tagebüchern. Such den Schlüssel im blauen Nachtlicht. Für immer Euer Souverän

Ludwig II [1]

29. August 1876

TWO

‘Sweet Jesus!’

Did this say what I think it said? My German was limited, but I couldn’t be that far off. My first impulse was to stuff it back where I’d found it, but the paper looked so brittle it might disintegrate at the slightest mishandling. Maybe I ought to show it to Kainz? Or Wolfgang Wagner? But then, how to explain how I’d found it? Had I just broken some law? Could this weird little note be deemed anything but the property of the Festival? Still, I couldn’t imagine the Wagner descendants wanting its bizarre implications read by anyone. Maybe it was a gag of some sort, devised by one of the student-stagehands; one not so willing as Kainz to spend his summer as an unpaid servant to Wagner’s art? If so, what was its purpose?

I made the decision to hold on to it—if only long enough to debunk it, with no idea how, where, or with whom. By carefully re-folding the note along its original creases, it exactly fit inside my passport, which I carry in a zip-lock baggie, for extra security, when traveling abroad.

Retracing my steps, I made my way backstage, smiling nervously, trying not to attract undue attention, and found Kainz, just as he was hoisting an effects-projector to a loft high-up in the stage-left proscenium. Apparently my recent whereabouts were of little concern to him.

‘Everything come out okay?’ he smirked.

‘Probably had too much breakfast,’ I mumbled. ‘I’m fine now.’ After stowing my jacket in a wall-locker, I joined Kainz in climbing up the narrow ladder to the topmost loft, nearly 40 feet from the stage deck—home to the ‘Water-Under-the-Rhine’ projectors. The rest of the morning was devoted to focusing and calibrating the machine to Herr Schmidt’s exacting specifications. At lunch break, I raced to catch the shuttle-bus to town, went straight to my hotel room, carefully smoothed out the note, placed it inside one of the plastic sleeves in my three-ring-binder, and hid the whole thing inside a garment bag.

I gobbled down a sausage and Coke from a vendor outside the Anker, grabbed a taxi back to the Festspielhaus and arrived just as the bell sounded for the doors to close and the full-scale dress rehearsal to begin.

Kainz and I climbed to our perch—our assignment was to keep the mottled-glass rotors, mounted in front of the projector, turning smoothly. Kainz had been given a one-way headset which allowed him to hear the stage-manager’s cues, but, once the curtain was raised, neither of us was permitted so much as a whisper.

Despite the initial thrill of the birds-eye view, I soon found it boring duty. I toyed with asking Kainz if he’d ever visited the royal box but fear of what he might suspect and castigation by the stage-manager kept me silent.

It was well past 10:00 that evening when I returned to the hotel, intending to cobble together an exact translation of the note. But, like the Army—plenty of hurry-up-and-wait went into rehearsing opera. Exhausted from the day’s exertions, I collapsed, fully clothed, on the bed and didn’t wake up until 7:00 next morning, with barely enough time to shower and catch the lorry back to the Festspielehaus.

I kept at this pace for the next few days, and the gruelling schedule along with fear of having my ‘find’ found out, reinforced my decision to keep it hidden from everyone, occasionally checking the garment bag to make sure it was still there.

On Monday morning of the second week of rehearsals (Parsifal, The Flying Dutchman, Lohengrin), shortly after reporting backstage, I was summoned to Wolfgang Wagner’s office. From the impassive looks of the German crew, I couldn’t tell whether this was good or bad. Kainz offered me a ‘who knows?’ shrug with his impish smile, and when I asked the messenger if he knew what this was about, the young man frowned. A knot began tying itself in my stomach. I could see the headlines:

American Steals Wagnarian Artifact!

Gets Life Sentence!

I stepped into an outer office and was greeted by a pleasantly round, immaculately groomed woman, somewhere in her mid-forties. She wore a crisply-starched cotton smock over her knitted two-piece suit.

‘Guten Tag. You would be Herr Holloway. Please have a seat. Maestro Wagner will be with you shortly.’

‘Thank you, er a . . .’ I looked about her desk for a name plate.

‘Of course. I am Fraulein Mack.’

‘Gudrun Mack, isn’t it?’

‘Prizisely! You’re