Götterdämmerung - ’Siegfried’s Death and Funeral March’.[HD]

Münchner Philharmoniker conducted by Sergui Celibidache (live performance 3 & 4 February 1993). The Swan King: Ludwig II of Bavaria. Ludwig II’s short life was steeped in tragic irony. Through his idealistic quest for romance and his fixation with Bavarian myths and legends, most tellingly with the Grail stories of Lohengrin - so potently incarnated in Wagner’s operas - the Swan King became more fabled than the very legends he sought to recreate. Yet in his desire to escape from a cloistered upbringing and the stale pattern of his adult life as king and his subsequent neglect of Bavaria at such a fragile period in its history, Ludwig planted the seeds of his own undoing - exposing himself to the treachery of factions unnerved by his eccentricity, extravagance, and luminous vision. Ludwig II’s death marked the passing of the old Bavaria and the birth of a new order, yet his legend lives on, a nineteenth century King Arthur, a man surpassed by his own mythological persona. One of the most