Three decadents : a high-level encounter
Luchino Visconti's "Ludwig" revisited from a Wagner perspective
Author : Jos Hermans
Luchino Visconti was fascinated by German culture particularly by Goethe, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Richard Wagner. But also by the Austrian version of it: Gustav Mahler, Franz Werfel, Stefan Zweig and Robert Musil. At the same time, he was also fascinated by its flip side. When the National Socialists installed a new order after the 1933 seizure of power, Visconti decided to get a closer look of what was going on. Later he would rarely talk about this period. Perhaps he was embarrassed to admit that he had admired the Nazis to some extent. What fascinated him in that new order can also be found in his own personality: order, determination, efficiency. He admired Leni Riefenstahl's infamous film Triumph des Willens not only for its technical and artistic merits but also for its idealization of youth, health, strength and order. He also experienced some of Hitler's mass spectacles and very likely was also fascinated by all those blond young brats in their menacing black uniforms.
Shortly after his visit to Germany, he meets Horst Paul Bohrmann, who helps him accept his own homosexuality and break the spell of the Nazis. A little later, when news of terror and persecution begin to spread, the initial admiration for Nazi Germany transforms into disgust. Regardless, an unconscious admiration for the Nazis will remain with him throughout his life. His two closest German friends, Horst and the composer Hans Werner Henze are of the opinion that he misunderstands Germany and Nazism, and that he tends to elevate both to a myth. We find the precipitation of this Nazi fascination in The Damned (1969), the first part of his "German trilogy." Henze was highly resentful of the way he presented the rise of Nazism in The Damned. Horst did not even go to see the movie. After Death in Venice (1971), he concluded his German trilogy with Ludwig (1972).
LUDWIG
The film begins with a scene in which Ludwig confesses to the family priest his determination to make his court a center of arts and sciences. This scene immediately introduces one of the film's leitmotifs in particular Ludwig's relationship to religion, to the state and to his own responsibilities. Next comes the splendor of the coronation scene. It is one of Visconti's most successful reconstructions of a historical period. A subsequent sequence shows the relationship between Ludwig and Elisabeth against the backdrop of a winter landscape in Bad Ischl. Ludwig's youthful romantic sensibility immediately contrasts with Elisabeth's more mature sense of responsibility, shrouded in a haze of gentle irony and humor.
What follows is a search for a politically interesting match as a wife for Ludwig, with Minister Pforz noting that the meeting with the Russian tsarina was not in a position to make the king forget his beloved Wagner. The next scene confirms Pforz in his accusations: Wagner appears on stage, utterly unscrupulous in exploiting both the king and the young conductor Hans von Bülow, whose wife Cosima has since become his mistress. Visconti's Wagner image is that of an unpleasant man who is outwitted in cunning only by Cosima. Later we see him playing with his dog, exactly as eyewitnesses have described him. Still later, however, we will also find that his affection for Ludwig is not entirely feigned. That duplicity which is always present in Wagner, I think Visconti has portrayed quite well.
Vainly Ludwig tries to arouse in Elisabeth some enthusiasm for Wagner's art. However, she becomes more and more distant and attempts to arouse in him an interest in her younger sister Sophie. The king prefers to seek solace in art. Among other things, we learn that the premiere of Tristan und Isolde cost the state a fortune.
Once again Ludwig makes an effort to win Elisabeth to the opera. She, for her part, tries to convince Ludwig of the madness of Wagner's project. She understands that the only role of the royal house is that of protocol and that intervening in affairs of state can be life-threatening. Ludwig, however, remains true to his romantic ideals regarding the role of the king and remains as uncompromising in this as Wagner is in his music. The Wagners do not hesitate to demand ever larger sums of money from the king to finance their luxurious lifestyle. Only when the police present the king with a pile of incriminating evidence does he stop deceiving himself and sign the order to banish the Wagners from Munich.
During the War of 1866, he locks himself up in Berg Castle and refuses to receive messages from the battlefield. He only wants to see his dear brother Otto but even he fails to convince him to take up his royal duties. After this conversation, he goes out for a night walk and meets one of his servants who is secretly swimming while nude. This makes the king uncomfortable. After the servant leaves, he prays, "Help me, help me."
What follows is a long conversation with Colonel Dürkheim followed by a scene in which Ludwig informs his mother of his plan to marry Sophie. The mother immediately begins preparations. The families of the bride and groom gather in a meeting in which Elisabeth also participates and steals the show. Later, in a short and wordless scene we see Sophie seated at the piano. In her young voice, she sings Elsa's aria Einsam in trüben Tagen from Lohengrin. Ludwig's pained face shows that the gap between reality and his ideals is growing deeper in his mind.
The next statement is about the enormous cost of building the king's castles followed by an endearing attempt to teach Ludwig traditional heterosexual behavior. Ludwig finds the arranged meeting with a prostitute distasteful and the engagement to Sophie becomes more and more problematic. Ludwig introduces Sophie to Wagner, claiming that she enjoys singing his music. A feat of cruel irony because the relationship between Ludwig and Wagner still appears to be much warmer than between Ludwig and his fiancée. The next scene with his servant Hornig, hints that Ludwig increasingly seeks the company of men.
Sophie complains to Elisabeth about Ludwig's indifference but the little advice she can give comes too late and would have been useless anyway. In the next scene, Ludwig announces during his confession that he will not marry Sophie. As we hear the end of the confession, we see Ludwig enter a room where Hornig is sleeping. Ludwig kisses him.
The next sequence deals with the breaking of the engagement, Otto's incurable mental illness and Queen Mother's obsession with the Catholic faith. The war with France is almost over and Ludwig retreats once more into seclusion, this time with the excuse of a toothache. Count von Holnstein shows up and suggests that the king sign a letter addressed to the King of Prussia proposing that he become king of united Germany. An almost hysterical Ludwig tries to refuse but finally has to give in. In an asylum, he visits Otto, now almost mad as hell, and manages to calm him down. The next scene switches to Tribschen where Wagner has the Siegfried Idyll performed as a Christmas gift to Cosima on the steps of his new home.
The next two statements concern the expenses of building the castles and the gifts Ludwig had delivered to beautiful servants and artists. The Jewish actor Kainz is now his newest protégé. The sequence showing their relationship is one of the most enchanting in Visconti's entire cinematic oeuvre: in his swan boat, Ludwig glides through the Venus grotto near Linderhof Castle, accompanied by Wolfram's song to the evening star from Tannhäuser; the castle itself is shown in all its glory with its large bedroom and with tables that can sink through the floor into the cellar so that servants can clear it off and set it again; there is a magical sleigh ride through the winter landscape, an enchanting evening ride that seems endless. Two further statements follow, the first reporting on what happened to Kainz afterwards; the second is again about building the castles.
The next sequence shows Elisabeth visiting the castles, beginning with the rococo castle Linderhof, continuing on to the Versailles-like Herrenchiemsee and finally ending with the fairy-tale castle Neuschwanstein where Ludwig himself resides. Under the excuse of illness, he refuses to meet her. But the pain that plagues him is not primarily of a physical nature. We hear from one of the servants that he heard the king weeping behind a closed door while constantly repeating Elisabeth's name. The scene ends with a shot of Elisabeth riding away in her carriage.
The king's physical condition is visibly deteriorating. With a blindfold before his eyes, we see him wandering around a Bavarian pub. The scene implies that he is once again indulging his homosexual inclination. Meanwhile, the government is forging plans to depose him. Prince Luitpold is asked to be regent and Professor von Gudden's final diagnosis is that Ludwig has fallen prey to an incurable form of paranoia and is no longer able to rule. The final sequence deals with his final hours: his arrest and transfer to Castle Berg, his impetus for the ultimate walk with von Gudden. When it becomes clear that they are staying behind for a long time, they are searched for. In darkness and rain, two bodies are found floating in the lake. Count von Holnstein communicates the official cause of death and the film ends with a shot of Ludwig lying on the soggy bottom.
THE MUSIC
Apart from Robert Schumann and Jacques Offenbach, the music in the film is mainly by Richard Wagner. The main theme is an instrumental adaptation by Franco Mannino of the love night from the second act of Tristan und Isolde, beginning from "So stürben wir um ungetrennt," a foreshadowing of Isolde's love death. It is first heard when Wagner is introduced and we, unsuspecting mortals, are informed of his interest in money. The connection between his blatant pursuit of self-interest and deceit is further reinforced when the orchestral music dies out in favor of Von Bülow playing another excerpt from the love night on a piano while his wife Cosima confides to Wagner that she is pregnant with him. In contrast to this, a longer excerpt from the same love night follows to accompany Ludwig and Elisabeth's nocturnal journey. As the film progresses, this music becomes more and more associated with the gradual loss of Ludwig's illusions as king, as protector of the arts and as a man.
The beginning of the overture to Lohengrin is also associated with disillusionment, particularly in relation to Wagner. We hear it first when Ludwig, during his first act of policy, asks his ministers that Wagner be tracked down and brought to Munich. Later we hear it again when Ludwig tells Wagner of the postponement of his marriage to Sophie. He has tried to project the image of Elsa onto her, and the gulf between the two has become manifest both to the king and to the audience when the princess makes a pathetic attempt to sing Elsa's aria Einsam in trüben Tagen.
O du mein holder Abendstern is sometimes heard, mostly as diegetic music. When Otto visits Ludwig during the War of 1866, this music is heard from a mechanical music box. At the end of the film, Ludwig listens to the same music box. The theme can also be heard in an instrumental version when Kainz and Elisabeth visit the Venus Grotto at Linderhof Castle. Here the music is quasi diegetic, the orchestra is not visible but the characters seem to hear the music. The theme can also be heard when Ludwig and Kainz travel on a sleigh through a dark snowy landscape.
During the credits, the Elegy in A-flat Major can be heard, a 13-measure theme that has been misidentified by many a biographer as the Porazzi theme, as Barry Millington and John Deathridge have shown. Wagner is said to have played it for Cosima 4 days before his death. Therefore, it is sometimes called Wagner's last musical idea. In the diary entry of Feb. 9, 1883, Cosima speaks of a "melody that sounds very beautiful" and that Wagner found it among his sketches and had forgotten that he had intended it as Widmungs-Blatt for the autograph of Parsifal. The theme moves in the harmonic mood of Tristan. This should not be surprising: the first 8 bars were written around 1858 when he was working on Tristan und Isolde, the last bars, written in the same purple ink as Parsifal, he must have written in 1881 while working on Parsifal. The theme can be heard on Nina Kavaradze's and Stephan Köhler's recordings of Wagner's integral piano music, among others. In the film, the theme is sometimes heard on piano, and sometimes as an orchestral arrangement by Franco Mannino, who also appears to have conducted all the orchestral excerpts. In his book Visconti e la musica, Mannino says he first heard of the theme in 1945 from Arturo Toscanini, who appears to have discovered it in Bayreuth when he went looking for the original manuscript of Parsifal. That story is true. Eva Chamberlain delivered the sketch to Toscanini in 1931 and wrote on the sheet : "dedicated to Mama to be placed in the score of Parsifal." For Franco Mannino, the unpublished piece of music proved difficult to find but the husband of co-screenwriter Suso Cecchi d'Amico owned a photograph of it and so the music ended up in the film after all. The poignancy of this music sets the tone for the entire film. On the other hand, it is through the film that the theme gained a certain notoriety. We first hear it when Wagner receives the letter from the king banishing him from Munich. Then it is heard briefly in the orchestral version when Ludwig tries some of the crown jewels on Sophie. Toward the end of the film it is heard again when Colonel Dürkheim makes his last attempt to save the king. Finally, we hear it again when both corpses are fished out of the lake and from here the music continues until the credits during which the piano version transitions to the orchestral version.
A final Wagner excerpt we get to hear is the Siegfried Idyll that Wagner has a chamber ensemble play for Cosima and his newborn son Siegfried. The scene with the prostitute features Offenbach's overture La Périchole, and in another scene we see Wagner playing an excerpt from La Vie Parisienne while exclaiming in disgust, "This is the music the Germans love instead of mine."
THE VERSIONS
After finishing shooting Ludwig on July 27, 1972, Visconti fell victim to a massive heart attack while dining at a Roman restaurant. The production company Mega Film had just signed a contract with MGM stating that the film should not exceed two hours. While that was not the cause of Visconti's heart attack, this was about half the length he had envisioned. Suso Cecchi d'Amico claimed that had Luchino remained healthy he would never have accepted it. The film finally went into release with a length of 2 hours and a half. According to IMDB, the original version lasts 238 minutes while it had been released in Germany in a 144-minute version and in Italy and the USA in a 185-minute version. The story structure in particular suffered in this regard. The film was originally set up as a frame narrative with "witnesses" reporting on various episodes of the king's life in a sort of tribunal to demonstrate the decline of his mental faculties. For the natural progression of events, these witnesses are obviously necessary; by omitting them, the scenes sometimes jump into each other abruptly and not always clearly.
After Visconti's death, the remaining material was sold at an auction. Cecchi d'Amico and former associates of Visconti bought it up and the film was restored to a 238-minute version. Visconti himself had already cut several scenes during filming notably the scene where Pfistermeister tracks down Wagner and hands him a ring as a gift from the king; Ludwig attending a private performance of Tristan und Isolde; Wagner's death in Venice and his funeral procession in Munich, to the tones of Beethoven's Eroica and Wagner's own Götterdämmerung. This is all very unfortunate because why shouldn't a film of this caliber have been allowed to last an hour longer and be brought into theaters in a two-part version? These are images that Tony Palmer will use 11 years later in his 6-hour Wagner biopic, but with a much lesser artistic result. On DVD, Ludwig is now invariably released in the 4-hour version. Most DVDs list a duration of about 228 minutes, which is 4% faster than the film which can be explained by the PAL speedup (see footnote).
Remains the problem of language selection. Each of Visconti's last films boasted an international cast, which by no means always chose Italian as the main language. With Ludwig, however, we are forced to listen to Romy Schneider and Helmut Berger in Italian (voice dubbing). On the versions released in our country by A-film and Homescreen, the German version voiced by the actors themselves is missing. This is a big omission. Untill shortly, those who wanted to hear the King of Bavaria and Elisabeth of Austria speaking German, had to rely on the double DVD of the German label Kinowelt. This one did offer a choice between German and Italian. No version can come across as natural and authentic as this self-dubbed German version, even if it is a dubbed version since the film was recorded in English! Meanwhile, the Kinowelt edition found its way onto Arthaus' 2015 Blu-ray release with superior picture and sound. The subtitles are limited to German just like the Directors Cut edition of Alive (Film Jewels) from the same year. This version is identical to the 2018 Extended Cut edition. The difference is a bonus DVD. For those who can speak German, this is the most interesting version.
Since 2017, there is also a blu-ray version in English, the language in which the film was shot, released by Arrow Academy. Because this version is based on the shorter American release of the theatrical film, only 75% of the dialogues are in English, the rest of the dialogues are in Italian. For English speakers, this is the most interesting version. To my knowledge, there is no edition that unifies all three audio versions.