Opulent Royal Residences - World's Greatest Palaces - S01 EP5 - History Documentary

Palaces, the most spectacular and lavish homes on earth. Luxuriously designed for the royals who wanted the biggest and the best. Behind the golden gates of these royal megastructures are incredible stories waiting to be discovered. Infamous monarchs from history and the artists, designers and engineers who turned their grand visions into a reality. These are the most opulent, flamboyant and innovative royal residences around the world. This time, a breathtaking fairy tale palace in the snow-capped mountains of Bavaria in Southern Germany that influenced Walt Disney, Created for the eccentric King Ludwig II, Neuschwanstein Castle is both a visual and engineering marvel, making it one of the world's greatest palaces. The village of Schwangau, 117 kilometers southwest of Munich, is the gateway to the fantastical Neuschwanstein Castle. Sitting in the Alps, the 19th century structure was the home of King Ludwig II of Bavaria. Inspired by the operas of German composer Richard Wagner, King Ludwig created Neuschwanstein to look medieval, but it was kitted out with all the latest innovations. Max Schraner has been guiding tourists through Neuschwanstein for 17 years. The whole castle was built from 1869 until 1886. After 17 years, they had to stop because of the king's quite mysterious and unexpected death. And although they built 17 years in all this, Neuschwanstein Castle wasn't and still isn't finished at all. We only have about 20 completed rooms, which are all situated in the main building of the castle, but there were more than 120 rooms planned. Despite dedicating almost two decades of his life to perfecting Neuschwanstein, King Ludwig II never got to fully complete his fairy tale palace. You must never forget King Ludwig II moved into the castle, so the king kind of lived on a construction site. His apartment was completed, of course, but on the other part of the castle, the construction work was still going on. And only six weeks after the king's death, the royal family opened it to the public as a museum. So after King Ludwig II, no one else has ever lived in here. Although it may look like a medieval structure, Ludwig had all the modern gadgets the 19th century had to offer added to Neuschwanstein. One of Ludwig's innovative ideas that was built in the 18th century. He used the technical capabilities of the 19th century to create his background, his fantasy worlds, his illusions there. This combination of modern, at the time modern technology and then to go back to the past. That is certainly an impressive affair. This system was driven by these very first batteries. It was an early use for an electric power system. Power systems have existed a couple of hundred years ago in all these great manors, for example, but an electric power system was quite new, quite modern, yeah. In 1964, five years before the foundations were laid at Neuschwanstein, the German state of Bavaria welcomed a new king. Ludwig II ascended to the throne quite early and quite unprepared. He was only 18 years old when his father, King Maximilian II, died quite unexpectedly at the age of about only 53. And so he took up his office and over the first couple of years he started to realise that the way that he was brought up was quite different from the reality then. Within two years of becoming king, Ludwig's Bavaria joined forces with Austria in a war with their neighbours to the north, Prussia, but were defeated. In 1870, Bavaria joined their former adversaries in the Franco-Prussian War with France. The German state won and Prussia became all-powerful. The German Empire was proclaimed and the King of Prussia became Emperor of Germany, which meant that not only had Bavaria lost its independence, but Ludwig had lost his role in life. A king without a kingdom, Ludwig had already decided to build his own. Bavaria had been left with little power after the war and the disillusioned monarch chose to shun the political life in Munich. Instead, in 1869, Ludwig headed into the Bavarian mountains to build himself a palatial home, Neuschwanstein Castle. Well, the foundation stone was laid on September 5th, 1869, by the king himself. And then they used quite modern technologies for building up this castle. Although it looks like an old medieval castle from the 10th to 12th centuries, it's actually quite a modern castle with steel inside and all the new technologies the late 19th century already had to offer. There was a great revival of interest in the Middle Ages and one of the greatest ways of seeing the Middle Ages was really by making their castles into this beautiful 19th century glossy version. So Ludwig was something of a romantic and certainly thought that if you rebuild a castle, you can go back to that actual time. The whole castle was actually designed not by an architect but by a painter from the Royal Theatre in Munich. His name was Christian Jung. He made several designs. The last one was actually approved by the king and then these designs were given to the real architects and they had to do all the mathematics and the statistics and stuff like this. The building of Neuschwanstein became a community project. The construction of the castle was actually the biggest employer of local people for a number of years in the area. Ludwig II apparently was imposing some quite unrealistic deadlines on these workers because he wanted to get it built as soon as possible. So there were up to 300 workers that were on site every day, which is quite incredible considering it's quite tight, it's quite precarious, there's not a lot of space to work in. So it must have been a really, really buzzing and busy site. They brought all the material up the hill. They first built a road up here and then they used horse and ox carriages and the train stop was about 15 miles away from here. So all the material, which was transported to this place from far away, they could use the train for that as well. But the construction workers soon found out that building a castle on top of a mountain was really as difficult as it sounds. There are huge problems with building on the side of a ravine and it's very dependent on the type of rock. But in a place that is prone to poor weather, where there is freezing, so the water gets in small fissures or cracks in the stonework and in the rock of the foundations and then freezes and expands and cracks and fractures the rock, then you continuously have a problem with bits of the facade falling off or the very foundations on which the whole building is built crumbling away. And this is the problem the castle has. It looks like it's been there for centuries. It is only just over a hundred years old and yet right from the beginning it has suffered from these problems that it needs continual maintenance and it started falling apart before they even finished constructing it. It is actually an enormous building in terms of height and it is a very stable building. And we ask ourselves, well how does he do this? It's actually, for the most part, a steel-framed building. And he sets up a steel frame that can carry then an enormous amount of weight. Then between the steel frames is actually brick. Brick isn't too terribly heavy. And what he then does, and this is all very modern, I mean it's almost breaking edge, pushing the envelope of construction engineering is what he's doing. He then clads it, I should say he gives a veneer, in the beautiful limestone that we see on the building itself. And that wonderful monochromatic is quarried in those mountains. So it creates an indivisibility between the architecture, the build, and then the landscape behind in which it is found. The king played an integral role in the structural engineering of Neuschwanstein. The input of Ludwig in the construction site was enormous. So he wanted to see every plan for every detail. And the more detailed things got, the more detailed his choosings became. After living in temporary accommodation on the construction site, Ludwig was finally able to move into his still incomplete new home in 1884. 15 years after, he'd laid the first stone. This is a castle. But it was also a palace. It was planned by Ludwig as his home. He wanted to live there and spend his life there. And every room that was finished, every part of the castle, bears the imprint of Ludwig's personality. It's all very well being inspired by fantasy, but fantasy is fantasy because it is unachievable. To try and produce the ultimate fantasy castle, that is something else. And this created huge challenges for his architects. They would come up with dreams of what the castle could be, which were far grander than Ludwig could ever afford. This castle costs about 6.1 million gold marks. It's a bit difficult to say in nowadays money because you can't really compare. If I would be forced to tell you an equivalent, it could be about 95 million euros. The interior design of Neuschwanstein Castle was inspired by King Ludwig II's boyhood hero, German composer Richard Wagner. Ludwig II watched his first performance of a Wagnerian opera at the age of about 15, which was the Lohengrin Opera. And the king loved the story and wanted to meet the composer. One of his first actions when he became king is that, OK, I want Wagner here. I want to invite Wagner and make him work. So he invited Wagner to come to Munich to court. Ingratiating Wagner to the king's court was a highly controversial decision. The composer Richard Wagner back then was, let's say, a bit on the run because he was wanted for bankruptcy and was very relieved that he found a new financial supporter and the king willingly spent quite a lot of money on Wagner in order to ensure that he could continue composing operas and using all these stories that the king loved in creating operas out of them. For many people, they really saw the music as incredibly transcendent and Ludwig himself was so keen to strengthen his position that allying himself with Wagner in this mythical greatness was something that he saw as making him more powerful. Ludwig had Neuschwanstein decorated with characters from Wagner's operas. The murals of Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Parsifal, they're there. You almost walk off the walls. Actually, it looks like the stage set for a Wagnerian opera. It's wonderful. This is the Siegfried Legend, the first part of the Nibelungen. I can see on these paintings... This one here is particularly interesting. You can see Siegfried, the main character of that story, standing on the right-hand side, and there his magic sword is made, the one with which he later kills the dragon. When you walk up to Neuschwanstein, you are participating in that theatre. You are part of that theatrical moment. You are one with Neuschwanstein and you are one with Parsifal. This is amazing, and it's almost post-modern, one could say. It's as if Ludwig says, I'm going to push that envelope and my society, my kingdom is going to come with. A recurring design theme in the palatial castle is the swan. The numerous references to the waterbird are inspired by the love story in Wagner's opera Lohengrin. Lohengrin comes in, two Flanders, a hero, a saviour, who will fight for the purity and the honesty and the honour of Elsa. He comes in on a swan. So all of a sudden we begin to see a linguistic referencing or complexity developing. Neuschwanstein, new swan mountain, a new swan cliff, we could suggest. Ludwig even included the swan in another of his technical innovations. This is the king's washstand. The water came from a natural source which was situated approximately 150 metres above us in the mountains and had enough natural pressure to allow cold water to come out of the silver swan's beak. The pipes down from the spring into the castle and then up again on each floor. The king only had to pull this small silver button down here and the water came out of the silver swan's beak. There was running water on all the floors. They were able to bring the water up not just to the ground floor but throughout the building. The kitchen had hot and cold running water and the toilets even had rinses. The water also provided the castle with central heating which was much needed during the cold Bavarian winters. Although Ludwig II wanted a medieval castle, he didn't want a drafty cold space. He wanted all the comforts that modern technology could provide. So he installed a hot air heating system, a central heating system to keep him warm. He had warm water piped through the building so that he could turn on the tap and have a bath. None of these would have been, of course, available in the Middle Ages. Central heating was a British idea that was really first investigated in the 1830s. We're talking here in the very early 1870s. So the building received a wonderful central heating that was energised via steam and steam boilers that were also a very new concept. Heat was also provided by the grand fireplaces located throughout the building. This fireplace here is a bit special because it's not only the biggest one we have in the castle but it's also the only one where the entrance, the opening, where they put the wood in, is not in the room itself. It's on the back side. So it was operated from the dining room, of course, because when the king was asleep in here, no-one else would dare to walk into the room to put a new layer of wood in there. And so they could do this from the other room. So we have the actual opening to this fireplace over here. You see, this is wood, that isn't, that's metal. And you can open it like this, and here it is. Despite being a monarch with little power, Ludwig still wanted to have the palatial home of a king. One of the grandest rooms at Neuschwanstein is Ludwig's beautifully decorated throne hall. We will now go into the throne room. As you've probably noticed, the most important object in the throne room is missing. The throne itself was supposed to be up there, but it was never made because the king died before they could manufacture it. The throne hall is built in the style of a Byzantine church. Byzantine art refers to art of the Eastern Roman Empire as headquartered in Constantinople, today's Istanbul. It has a sort of a Greek feel. And as I look at that room, I notice that the gold ground has eight saints who were kings. Then I notice Michael the archangel in a mosaic. I notice an enormous candelabra, which is modelled after the crown of St Stephen of Hungary. It's made of gilded brass, so it's quite heavy. It weighs about 1,000 kilograms, or 2,000 pounds. It has 96 candles, and it can be lowered down to the floor by means of a winch, which is situated above the throne hall in the attic. The coloured stains you can see on the chandelier, they're just coloured glass, so no real gemstones, I'm afraid. Measuring 20 metres long, 12 metres wide and 13 metres high, the throne hall occupies both the third and fourth floors in the west wing of the castle. The throne room has quite a unique feature in it. So it's huge, it's 65,000 square feet in size, and they used steel. So steel was actually, as a material, just starting to really gain popularity as a construction material in the mid to late 1800s, which is the time that this castle was being built. Nowhere is the strange hybrid nature of this castle more obvious than when you get to the throne room. Here one can see the medieval meeting the technology that was necessary to construct the building. It's sort of on display, but it's also sort of concealed. So at this point, strange artifice of the building comes apparent. Some parts of the throne hall may look classical in design, but are really just a facade for the 19th century technology beneath. All the columns, for example, they're no real marble columns. They have steel inside, it's covered with plaster, and they just paint it. Because during the building process, the king always changed his mind. So they had to put steel inside, which goes up through these columns up here, through the blue ones up there, and also on top, the cupola as well, in order to support the whole construction. And you also have these steel T-bars underneath the floor as well. If you think about trying to span a really long distance, you generally use a big beam. And with the gravity, the beams get pulled down a little bit, and that causes the beams to flex. So you get a little bit of a pulling action at the bottom of the beam, and a little bit of a squashing action at the top of the beam. But the larger the span is, the bigger those actions are. And at some point, timber is just not strong enough to resist those forces. But steel, on the other hand, it's orders of magnitude stronger, and so using this new modern material that they had just figured out how to manufacture on a big scale, meant that they could create this really large, impressive throne room for the king. Despite the illusion of grandeur, King Ludwig II never appeared to be comfortable as a monarch. Hidden away in Neuschwanstein Castle, his fantastical home in the Bavarian mountains, he shunned his political and public duties. He didn't like court life. He stopped reviewing military parades. He stopped holding court banquets. He only had a few friends. He didn't seem to like the Bavarian nobility. But in January 1867, Ludwig did get engaged to Duchess Sophie Charlotte, the sister of Empress Elizabeth of Austria. Ludwig was engaged to Sophie Charlotte in Bavaria. She was a very distant cousin, and they basically grew up together, not in the same residence, but her house. Her family was part of the royal family, and so they saw each other regularly. And she liked Wagner too. They liked music and literature, so they were in close contact, like brother and sister, something like that. The nine-month engagement to Sophie was called off in October 1867, and Ludwig never produced an heir. He remained a very private king, who enjoyed a life of solitude. He also didn't want to watch performances within a crowded theatre. The king hated being stared at and people always looking at him. As the king was getting older and older, more and more retreated from the public, and so he ordered extra performances just for himself. So he was the sole audience member. The entire opera had to be performed just for himself. This has often been held against Ludwig, saying only a madman would do that. But Ludwig said, if I am in the theatre with all the others, then they will not be watching Tristan and Isolde. They will be looking at me, and I do not wish this. That's actually quite rational when you think about it. As if to reinforce his life of misanthropy, Ludwig had a grotto added to his private suites at Neuschwanstein. The next room we're about to go through, we definitely want to inspect that one up on the third floor behind the living room, because we're going now through an artificially constructed cave. This cave here is supposed to represent the Venus grotto from the Tannhäuser opera. The king loved the special scene of the story so much that he said, well, I'd like to have a cave just like that one inside my castle. And as he was the king, I had to build one. So once again, he created his own kind of fantasy world, stage set within the castle, actually. You won't go into it and think, oh, this has to be some outside external rock cave. The door itself, one side was just a normal door, but if you then went in, the other side of the door was made from this fake rock, a papier-mâché-style material, and you could essentially kind of shut yourself into this little cave in the middle of your palace. It's astonishing, really, but I suppose we might compare it to people who might be terribly rich now and build themselves a meditation room or something. It's just that Ludwig wanted it to look like a cave. The grotto is in stark contrast to the room where the king would have slept. We're now in the king's bedroom. The bedroom was built in Neo-Gothic style. You can see quite a lot of wood carvings in here. The finest work in here is the bed, of course. The canopy above it shows all the different Gothic church towers. And if you have a look into the bed, you can see the king had also golden stars in it. So I love this kind of motif with the blue skies and golden stars. I always suggest take a minute or two in the bedroom and simply engage in that beautiful woodworking of the bed, his kingly bed, that he probably never slept in. We don't really know how long they actually had to work on all this, but it is said that 14 woodcarvers had to work for about 4 1⁄2 years on this room alone. Although he lived a life away from the hustle and bustle of Munich, Ludwig remained in contact with his parliament. The main myth about Ludwig is that he didn't act as a king, but that was not true at all. He just wasn't residing in Munich. He just didn't fit into the clockwork of the government. So when they wanted to have something signed, they had to go to him. And he was on a very regular basis on his classes. But in Munich, it could look like as he was a bit erratic, wandering around the countryside. That was basically not true. And Ludwig was always contactable, thanks to another state-of-the-art device he had installed at Neuschwanstein. Over here, on the right-hand corner, you find another very interesting technical detail of the castle, the king's very own telephone. This telephone is actually from 1884. It was one of the first telephones in Bavaria, produced by the Siemens Company. As it was one of the first telephones, it just had one single connection. It was from the castle down to the post and telegraph office in the village. He's one of the first monarchs to have a telephone. He loved telephoning, especially to his mother. When you visit Neuschwanstein, you can see the telephone. It's absolutely magnificent. But technology can not only afford communication, it can afford a removal from society. So again, he knows exactly where to place these modern innovations to further his goals. But one of Ludwig's technological advancements didn't get off the ground. What he also wanted to do was create, just outside of Neuschwanstein, a wonderful cable car situation that was not funicular, but rather on literally a cable. And this cable car situation would have presented, shall we say, a dock in the lake that is just underneath Neuschwanstein. And then via a wheel mechanism that was steam-powered, the steam power would have energized the cables, that in turn would have been pulling a cable car that was a swan. And in this, he could then ride from Neuschwanstein down to the lake and then over to his mother's castle as well. And everybody thought he was out of his mind. But when we think of today's cable cars that bring us up to the top of a mountain to go skiing, he's an innovator. After 17 years of building his fantasy palace, King Ludwig II was continually trying to improve upon Neuschwanstein. But in 1886, his dream turned into a nightmare. Ludwig had private money and he had a royal income, and that was basically where the money came from. The problem was that he was overspending, generally overspending at the later times. And then he ran into debt, and the debt was piling up. In the early 80s, there was the first person who said, OK, I'll go to court if you don't pay my bills. Then it became difficult because he could, in theory, have been judged just to pay by his own courts. So that became a real problem. He spent so much money that he basically couldn't pay those debts anymore in the end. And when the government, the ministers, saw that he basically wanted to have more and more money that no one could pay anymore, and then there was the threat of expropriation, then the ministers actually tried to pull a kind of emergency brake and pleaded that Ludwig II be excommunicated, that he could no longer be king. In June 1886, the Bavarian Parliament made the decision to officially depose Ludwig. A psychiatric report claimed he was paranoid and stated, suffering from such a disorder, freedom of action can no longer be allowed and Your Majesty is declared incapable of ruling. He's no longer king. They attempt to arrest him. This is unsuccessful. They return with a greater militia-like formation on 11 June 1886 to Neuschwanstein, where he is residing. He is able to revoke them once again. They go down into the little village, have a luxurious breakfast, and go back up the mountain. And with the help of a devious, or I should say compliant house personnel, Ludwig is arrested. King Ludwig II would never step foot inside Neuschwanstein again. He is taken in a carriage that cannot be opened from the interior to a palace on Starnberg Lake, just south of Munich. A palace that he had loved as a young man, in which he spent many, many happy hours. In the meanwhile, they have converted it into an asylum. If the king really was mentally ill, nobody really knows. You see, the only way to get rid of a king back then legally was to say that he was mentally ill. They collected evidence, things the king wrote in his diary, for example. They interviewed servants and other staff from the royal court. And the doctors who wrote that medical report actually never even saw the king. They didn't have a proper examination or anything like this. They just wrote what people were told to tell them. He could be obsessed, and he has an enormous energy. But the organization of his building projects, the organization of his innovative moments in construction engineering, architectural ideas, though they were conceived as mad, he cannot be a mad person. They are too perfect and too coherent in their organization to be done by a mad person, or by somebody who is sociopathic or psychopathic. And they themselves, I believe, are enough evidence to prove that he was not insane. And that's something we should also consider in terms of Ludwig II. After spending just two nights in the asylum, under the watchful eye of his psychiatrist, Dr Bernhard von Gooden, despair turned to tragedy for Ludwig. On June 13th, 1886, the king and his psychiatrist went for a walk to the lake. Whilst they didn't come back in the evening, they sent out a search party. It found both of them, the king and the psychiatrist, dead in the lake. What really happened there, nobody knows. It's still a mystery. You see, the king died in kind of knee-deep water, although he was an excellent swimmer. So that's a bit fishy. We know for certain that two of the caretakers were to follow behind. And we know for certain, because both of these caretakers swear to this, that Gooden waved them away. How those two bodies arrived there, we do not know. There are all sorts of theories. They were shot, they both drowned, they fight in the water. We also know that Ludwig was wearing a large, heavy coat. It must have been a cooler day, and it was raining. That we know. What happened between Gooden waving the caretakers away and the bodies being found in the water will remain a mystery. Despite an autopsy report that stated that Ludwig had no water in his lungs, his death was officially ruled as suicide by drowning. It was not a big secret, and is not a secret, about this death. We know that he went for a walk with his doctor, Dr. Gooden, on June 13th, and that he tried to escape. And that his doctor tried to prevent that. And today we assume that Ludwig, who was much bigger and stronger than his doctor, fought with him in the lake, pushed him underwater, and when he saw that he had killed a person, he committed suicide. So the death of Ludwig II is not that mysterious. There are many other theories. There's an almost Arthurian myth in some quarters in Bavaria. They almost believe he might come back one day, his ghost haunts everywhere, and quite a lot of people think that he was murdered. But I would be inclined to believe the official version is true. Ludwig's deposition, incarceration and subsequent death meant that his beloved Neuschwanstein Castle was left unfinished. The building was never completed, and we know as well that what Ludwig was going to do was add more to it. So it became very conceptual. He was going to have a purification bath. This was to be heated by those same boilers that were doing the central heating, and then creating a series of beautiful ovens and stoves for the heating process. And so again, bringing us back to these very modern ideas and innovative ideas. Riddled with financial problems at the time of his death, there was only one way to clear Ludwig's debt. Not even two decades later, the entrance fees had paid for the debt. Already in 1899, and all the king's debt were paid in 1901. So not even 15 years after his death, the debt was paid off by the entrance fees. But almost 60 years after the death of Ludwig, his castle fell into the hands of the Nazis during the Second World War. So World War II, Neuschwanstein became a depot for looted art. Hitler wanted to build an immense museum for art in Linz, then Austria, so he looted basically all of Europe. He could get his hands on and took the best pieces of art in order to put them up all in Linz. And Neuschwanstein served as a depot for the looted art from France and Belgium. Towards the end of the war, the SS were planning on blowing up Neuschwanstein to destroy all the looted art. But fortunately, the castle was surrendered to the Allies before the plan materialized. The American army reached Neuschwanstein on the 28th of April, 1945, and there was no resistance. The gate was open, and they said, OK, here's your art. Luckily, a very great French art curator had the forethought to write down what had been taken and somehow find out where they were going, so everything was recovered intact. And also, thankfully, the castle is intact. Today, Neuschwanstein is a major tourist attraction, with over one million annual visitors to the fantastical home of Ludwig II. What's very unique about the castle is that the majority of our castles and palaces bear the imprint of a variety of personalities. They're rebuilt, they're changed. Each time a new king arrives, he changes it, or a queen changes it, and it's altered, and new bits are put on. But that's not the same here. It almost pretty much is preserved in the pristine state that it was for Ludwig. It's all about him, exactly what he wanted. As well as wowing visitors from around the globe, the glorious castle also had a huge impact on one of Hollywood's most famous men. Well, Disney definitely used this castle as an inspiration. He had a white castle, a bit fairytale-like, with all these small towers and turrets and stuff like this. And he loved this castle. He used it as an inspiration. If you think that castles were once fortresses and the whole point of turrets was to protect and to shoot arrows and to look far ahead, these turrets are all beautiful, Cinderella-seeking beauty. It is a place of fantastical, beautiful, marvellous, wild excess. So if you want a real Disney castle outside of Disney, I think you've got it. Because of its perilous position in the Bavarian Alps, Neuschwanstein needs constant maintenance to keep it from subsiding. But the castle still stands proud as one of the most visually stunning and technically advanced royal residences in the world. Neuschwanstein's success is in producing a building that doesn't look like it's been designed, that looks like it's grown up, but is also everybody's idea of the perfect castle. If you want to know who Ludwig was, just go to the castle. It's all there. You see his romanticism, his idealism, his slight naivety, and the fact was that the castle became a complete obsession with him, blowing everything out of the water. And you might argue, to a degree, the government said it. It did send him slightly mad. Why do we go to Neuschwanstein? Why do 1.5 million people trek all the way down south of Munich, into the Alps, up that mountain? How are they getting there? And I think the answer to that is a search for beauty.