SUN KINGS AND SHADOW KINGDOMS

In earlier years, the festival dramaturgy was primarily determined by anniversaries and political occasions: the Mozart year 2006, commemoration of the Constitutional Convention of 1948, the climate-change debate. In its tenth season, the Herrenchiemsee Festival turned once more to its core theme, Ludwig II of Bavaria: the monarch of a state in political and technological turmoil; the royal dreamer, who bestowed artistic reality on his fantasies of the Baroque Sun-kingdom in Herrenchiemsee, and the disturbed loner who withdrew increasingly into his self-chosen shadow kingdom. Herrenchiemsee Palace is a fascinating image of this kingdom: with its ornate state-rooms on the model of Versailles; but also with endless suites of unfinished halls, construction carcasses left behind as documents of failure.