I don't much care for Wagner, and think he made a mess of the Nieblungenlied and Parsival and harbor the suspicion that part of the reason Ludwig II was done in had to do with "artistic differences" about that sort of thing.

That was five years ago but nobody corrected it... Wagner died in 1883, and it wasn't until 1886 that Ludwig murdered his psychiatrist and drowned himself.

I recently read a fascinating book, "The Monarch Dines", by Theodor Haweis, who was a teenage kitchen assistant in Ludwig's court at the end of his reign. He describes his younger self brilliantly: so awed by the institution of monarchy that he couldn't bring himself to think of any problem with the King expecting to be served dinner at dawn on gold plates with settings for his three imaginary friends. Ludwig was as mad as a box of frogs, but Haweis describes his deposition as a total upset to the order of nature.

Surtitles: I had an interesting experience with those watching Tristan and Isolde in Barcelona. It was sung in German (of which I could only get the occasional word) and the surtitles were in Catalan... which I could follow in places: it's similar to Provencal, and I've read enough mediaeval Provencal song lyrics to understand quite a bit of a love story that mostly came out of the troubadours' world.