'Mad' king Ludwig II of Bavaria lost gift to composer Richard Wagner gets rare show

Kept safe in a silk-lined box by its Belgian “custodian” lies a piece of the historic legacy of German composer Richard Wagner that was nearly lost forever. The Lohengrin vase, made of porcelain, was given to Wagner more than 150 years ago by Ludwig II, the “mad king” of Bavaria, whose passion for building fairy-tale castles was matched only by his love of Wagner’s operas. It was believed lost after Allied bombing in World War II destroyed much of Bayreuth, the town where Wagner built the legendary theatre that now hosts an annual music festival. But one fragment emerged after the war and was taken to the Belgian capital, Brussels, in 1949, where it has largely remained out of sight in the intervening years. A group of Wagner devotees recently received a special viewing during a production in Brussels of the opera “Lohengrin” — the work that first bewitched Ludwig — and an AFP reporter was given a rare glimpse. Patrick Collon, the renowned organ maker and art expert who now owns th