The Munich Glockenspiel: show times, the stories behind the figures, and where to stand to actually see them.
Every day the city's central Marienplatz square is crammed with onlookers with their chins aimed skywards. They’re watching one of the city’s most loved oddities, the Munich Glockenspiel, or carillon.
This is the famous chiming clock that's built into the tower of the Neues Rathaus (New Town Hall). It's usually billed as the fourth largest carillon in Europe, it has 43 bells and 32 near life-sized figures, and it first played in 1908. Over 12 to 15 minutes, depending on the tune, those figures act out two stories from 16th century Munich: a royal wedding with a joust thrown in, and a dance that marked the end of a plague.
It's one of those things everybody says is overrated until they're stood there watching a copper knight get knocked off his horse. I've seen it more times than I can count and I still stop for it.
MUNICH GLOCKENSPIEL: The wedding party and joust play out on the top tier, the coopers dance on the one below. The copper has weathered to that distinctive green.
It's free, obviously. The music changes with the calendar: the clock has six music drums holding 22 melodies, mostly old folk songs and marches, and they're swapped round through the year. One drum only comes out for Advent.
TWO LEVELS: The top tier is the 1568 wedding and joust, the lower one the coopers' dance.
Don't plant yourself right under the tower. You'll get a crick in your neck and a lovely view of the underside of a balcony. Walk back towards the middle of the square, near the Mariensäule (Mary's Column), and get there five or ten minutes early in summer, at weekends and during school holidays, because it gets packed.
GOOD SPOT: Head back towards the golden Virgin on the Mariensäule and you get the whole oriel window in view.
If you want to see the figures properly, get up high. Older guidebooks tell you to ride the escalators in the Hugendubel bookshop opposite the tower and watch through its big windows. That shop was rebuilt and shrank a fair bit in 2016–17, so these days my pick is Café Glockenspiel, on the fifth floor of Marienplatz 28, which looks straight across at the clock. Grab a window table, order a coffee and a slice of cake, and you've got the best seat in the house. Fair warning: everyone else has had the same idea at 10.50am.
The 9pm show is the quiet option. Far fewer people, and you can actually hear the bells.
The upper part of the oriel window tells the story of the wedding of Duke Wilhelm V of Bavaria (1548–1626) and Renata of Lorraine in February 1568. It was one of the most lavish parties of the Renaissance anywhere in Europe, never mind Munich. Half the continent's high nobility turned up. The Austrian archdukes alone arrived with a train of more than 1,500 horses, and on the day of the wedding the bride was collected from nearby Dachau by no fewer than 3,500 mounted riders. Then there was the food. One account has more than 600 oxen carved up and cooked for the revellers; another puts it at 521 Hungarian oxen. Either way, nobody went hungry.
The party ran for something like two and a half weeks (18 days by one count), with banquets, hunts, theatre, dancing and the odd firework display, and the bill came to somewhere around 200,000 thalers.
THE GROOM: Wilhelm V, whose wedding is re-enacted twice a day.
A lot of what we know comes from Massimo Troiano, a singer in the court chapel who wrote the whole thing up in loving detail. He was being paid to make the court look good, mind, and a couple of years later he was accused of murdering a colleague and vanished. So take the colourful bits with a pinch of salt.
Wilhelm and Renata sit and watch from the top tier while the rest of the party moves around them. Wilhelm went on to rule Bavaria from 1579, and in 1589 he founded the court brewery that gave the world the Hofbräuhaus, which is probably why most visitors have heard of him. He was known as Wilhelm the Pious, his reign also saw a wave of witch trials in Bavaria, and he spent so much money that he ended up abdicating in 1597 with the duchy close to bankrupt. Not quite the jolly brewer he's sometimes made out to be.
The highlight of the 1568 celebrations was a tournament held right here on Marienplatz. The square was covered in sand, a wooden barrier split the lanes, and riders charged at each other with lances over several days. The crowd favourite was the Kröndlstechen, or crown joust, and it's this that the Glockenspiel re-enacts.
The overall winner was a gloriously named knight called Caspar Nothaft von Wernberg zu Alhaming. He reportedly "injured several fingers on his left hand, but not before unhorsing four riders", which sounds like a fair trade.
HORSEBACK HEROES: Blue and white for Bavaria, red and white for Lorraine. You can guess who comes off worse.
On the Glockenspiel two knights ride at each other: a Bavarian in white and blue, and one representing Lorraine in red and white. The Lorraine knight, who's a hefty 2.10m tall, is the clock's eternal loser. He gets unhorsed in the second round every single time and has to be hauled back into the saddle by hand afterwards. Look out for the herald, a page in a grass-green hat and the standard bearer with the white and blue Bavarian diamonds.
THE WEDDING PARTY: Close up on the top tier, with the bride and groom's guests lined up behind the balustrade.
Once the joust is over, the action drops down a level to the red-coated coopers, the barrel makers, who do a ritual jig called the Schäfflertanz (coopers' dance).
THE COOPERS: Hoops held high on the lower tier, with the Hanswurst jester figure in the middle.
UP CLOSE: The red-coated coopers and their jester.
The story goes that in 1517, after a terrible visitation of the plague, the coopers were the first to dare go back out into the streets. They danced through the town to tell a frightened, cowering population the danger had passed and it was safe to come out. Duke Wilhelm IV, Wilhelm V's grandfather, was so relieved that he's supposed to have ordered the dance be repeated every seven years so nobody forgot. Lovely tale. Historians reckon the dance is older than that, though, and the plague link was attached to it later.
Either way, it's still going. Real coopers (well, members of the guild in the full get-up of red jackets, green caps and white stockings) dance the Schäfflertanz all over the city every seven years during Fasching, Munich's carnival season, which runs from Epiphany on 6 January to Shrove Tuesday. The last outing was the 2026 season, so the next one isn't until 2033. If you can't wait that long, there are a couple of cooper statues at the entrance to Schäfflerstraße, west of the Marienhof park behind the Neues Rathaus.
The show finishes with a small golden cockerel popping out at the very top of the oriel window and crowing three times. That's your cue that it's over, and the crowd scatters back to the shops in about 30 seconds flat. Fun fact: the cockerel, along with the jester in the coopers' group, is switched on by hand.
Hardly anyone knows about this one. Every evening at 9pm two more figures appear in the twin bays directly below the clock face. On one side a night watchman sounds the curfew on his horn, to the night watchman's call from Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. On the other, the Angel of Peace blesses the Münchner Kindl, the little child-monk who is the symbol of the city, and tucks it in for the night while Brahms' Lullaby plays. It's short, it's oddly sweet, and you'll have room to breathe. You can spot another Münchner Kindl right at the top of the town hall tower, too.
The Glockenspiel is electromechanical and these days runs on solar power. There are 43 bells and 44 playing mechanisms (one's a spare). The control room is on the fifth floor of the tower and the music drum up on the eighth, and neither is open to the public, sadly. Staff are up there every day cleaning, oiling and tightening screws, and even so hot or cold weather can still push the odd note off key.
The bells got a full overhaul around the city's 850th birthday in 2008, when they were taken down, restored and retuned for the first time in almost a century. The figures have been repainted since, and the coopers were moved down a level. One thing that never happened: in 1958 the city tried to get Carl Orff, of Carmina Burana fame, to write a piece for the clock. It didn't come off.
NEUES RATHAUS: The 85m tower, with the Glockenspiel about halfway up and the Münchner Kindl on the very top.
The building the Glockenspiel lives in isn't anywhere near as old as it looks. The Neues Rathaus was put up in stages from 1867 to the early 1900s by architect Georg von Hauberrisser, in a neo-Gothic style borrowed from the great town halls of Flanders. The façades are crammed with sculptures from Bavarian history and legend, so it's worth a slow walk along the front once the crowd has thinned.
A few things I'd look out for:
The sculptor who made the Münchner Kindl on top of the tower, Anton Schmid, used his nine-year-old son Ludwig as the model. Which is a nice thing to know while you're craning your neck at it.
Easy. Any S-Bahn running through the city centre, or the U3 or U6, to Marienplatz drops you right in the square. From the Hauptbahnhof it's one or two stops, or a 15 to 20-minute walk along the pedestrian zone. While you're here, the Hofbräuhaus, the Viktualienmarkt, the Frauenkirche and Alter Peter are all a few minutes' walk away.
Here's a video of the Glockenspiel doing its thing. It's well filmed, but believe me, it's one of those things you need to see for real, stood in the square with a few hundred other people going "oooh" when the knight falls off.
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