The political ban that had been placed on Wagner in Germany after he had fled Dresden had been fully lifted in 1862.

The composer had settled in Biebrich in Prussia, where he had begun work on Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, the idea for which had come during a visit he had made to Venice with the Wesendoncks.

This opera is his only mature comedy.

Wagner between 1861 and 1864 had tried to have Tristan und Isolde produced in Vienna.

Despite numerous rehearsals, the opera had remained unperformed, and had gained a reputation as being "impossible", which had further added to Wagner's financial woes.

Wagner had finally parted from Minna in 1862, though he will continue to give her financial support until her death in 1866.

Wagner's fortunes had taken a dramatic upturn in 1864, when King Ludwig II at the age of eighteen succeeded to the throne of Bavaria.

The young king, an ardent admirer of Wagner's operas since childhood, had had the composer brought to Munich.

He had settled Wagner's considerable debts, and had proposed to stage Tristan, Die Meistersinger, the Ring, and the other operas Wagner has planned.

Wagner has also begun to dictate his autobiography, Mein Leben, at the King's request.

To Wagner, it seems significant that his rescue by Ludwig coincided with his learning the news of the death of his earlier mentor, but later supposed enemy, Giacomo Meyerbeer, regretting ungratefully that "this operatic master, who had done me so much harm, should not have lived to see this day". (Wagner, Richard (tr. Andrew Gray) (1992), My Life, New York: Da Capo Press. ISBN 978-0-306-80481-6. Wagner's partly unreliable autobiography, covering his life to 1864, written between 1865 and 1880 and first published privately in German in a small edition between 1870 and 1880. The first (edited) public edition appeared in 1911. Gray's translation is the most comprehensive available.)

After grave difficulties in rehearsal, Tristan und Isolde premiers at the National Theater in Munich on June 10, 1865, the first Wagner opera premiere in almost fifteen years. (The premiere had been scheduled for May 15, but had been delayed by bailiffs acting for Wagner's creditors, and because the Isolde, Malvina Schnorr von Carolsfeld, was hoarse and needed time to recover.)

The conductor of this premiere is Hans von Bülow, whose wife, Cosima, had given birth in April this year to a daughter, named Isolde, the child not of von Bülow but of Wagner.

Cosima is twenty-four years younger than Wagner and is herself illegitimate, the daughter of the Countess Marie d'Agoult, who had left her husband for Franz Liszt.

Liszt disapproves of his daughter seeing Wagner, though the two men are friends.

The indiscreet affair scandalizes Munich and, to make matters worse, Wagner falls into disfavor among members of the court, who are suspicious of his influence on the king.

King Ludwig is finally forced to ask Richard Wagner to leave Munich in December 1865.

He apparently also toys with the idea of abdicating in order to follow his hero into exile, but the composer quickly dissuades him.

Neuschwanstein Castle (German: lit. "new swanstone"), a Romanesque Revival palace on a rugged hill above the village of Hohenschwangau near Füssen in southwest Bavaria, Germany, had been commissioned by Ludwig II of Bavaria as a retreat and as an homage to Richard Wagner.

Ludwig had paid for the palace out of his personal fortune and extensive borrowing, not with Bavarian public funds.

Designed as the romantic ideal of a knight's castle, the effect of the Neuschwanstein ensemble is highly theatrical, both externally and internally.

The palace had been intended as a personal refuge for the reclusive king, but it is opened to the paying public immediately after his death in 1886.

In the one hundred and twenty-five years since its opening, over sixty million people have visited Neuschwanstein Castle.

More than thirteen hundred thousand people visit annually, with up to six thousand per day in the summer.

The palace has appeared prominently in several movies and was the inspiration for Disneyland's Sleeping Beauty Castle and later, similar structures.

King Ludwig II had installed Richard Wagner at the Villa Tribschen, beside Switzerland's Lake Lucerne.

Die Meistersinger had been completed at Tribschen in 1867, and had premièred in Munich on June 21 of the following year.

At Ludwig's insistence, "special previews" of the first two works of the Ring, Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, had been performed at Munich in 1869 and 1870, but Wagner wants the complete cycle to be performed in a new, specially designed opera house.

Minna had died of a heart attack on January 25, 1866, in Dresden.

Wagner did not attend the funeral.

Following Minna's death, Cosima had written to Hans von Bülow on a number of occasions asking him to grant her a divorce, but this does not materialize until after she has two more children with Wagner; another daughter, named Eva, after the heroine of Meistersinger, and a son Siegfried, named for the hero of the Ring.

Legal processes had extended the marriage until July 18, 1870, when the divorce had finally been sanctioned by a Berlin court.

Richard and Cosima were now able to marry.

The wedding had taken place on August 25, 1870.

On Christmas Day of this year, Wagner arranges a surprise performance of the Siegfried Idyll for Cosima's birthday.

The marriage to Cosima will last to the end of Wagner's life.

The Bayreuth Festspielhaus ("Festival Theater") is completed in 1875, and the festival scheduled for the following year.

Richard Wagner is responsible for several theatrical innovations developed at the Festspielhaus, for the design of which he has appropriated some of the ideas of his former colleague, Gottfried Semper, which he had solicited for a proposed new opera house at Munich.

These innovations include darkening the auditorium during performances, and placing the orchestra in a pit out of view of the audience.

Wagner overlays leitmotif upon a continuous moving harmonic structure, and revolutionizes the operatic form by including all the arts.

Wagner had decided in 1871 to move to the town of Bayreuth as the location of his new opera house.

The local council donated a large plot of land—the "Green Hill"—overlooking the town, as a site for the theater.

The Wagners had moved to the town the following year, and the foundation stone for the Bayreuth Festspielhaus ("Festival Theater") had been laid.

Wagner had announced the first Bayreuth Festival for 1873.

Since Ludwig had declined to finance the project, the start of building had been delayed and the proposed date for the initial festival had been deferred.

In order to raise funds for the construction, "Wagner Societies" have been formed in several cities, and Wagner himself had begun touring Germany conducting concerts.

By the spring of 1873, only a third of the required funds had been raised; further pleas to Ludwig had initially been ignored, but early in 1874, with the entire project on the verge of collapse, the king had relented and provided a loan.

The full building program includes a handsome villa, "Wahnfried" ("Peace/freedom from delusion/madness" in German), into which Wagner, with Cosima and the children, had moved from their temporary accommodation on April 18, 1874.

Richard Wagner’s friend and patron King Ludwig II of Bavaria, who had supported the construction in 1872-76 of the Festspielhaus in the town of Bayreuth after Court opposition thwarted plans for a monumental festival theater for Wagner's opera in Munich, attends the dress rehearsal and third public performance of the complete Ring Cycle in 1876.

Ludwig’s Schloss Linderhof, an ornate palace in neo-French Rococo style, with handsome formal gardens, is completed in 1878.

The grounds contain a Venus grotto lit by electricity, where Ludwig is rowed in a boat shaped like a shell.

After seeing the Bayreuth performances, Ludwig had built, in the forest near Linderhof, Hunding's Hut (Hundinghütte) (based on the stage set of the first act of Wagner's Die Walküre) complete with an artificial tree and a sword embedded in it.

In Die Walküre, Siegfried's father Siegmund, pulls the sword from the tree. (Hunding's Hut will be destroyed in 1945 but a replica will be constructed at Linderhof in 1990.

In 1877 a small hermitage (Einsiedlei des Gurnemanz) as in the third act of Wagner's Parsifal, had been erected near Hunding's Hut, with a meadow of spring flowers, where the king would retire to read. (A replica made in 2000 can now be seen in the park at Linderhof.)

Nearby, a Moroccan House, purchased at the Paris World Fair in 1878, is erected alongside the mountain road. (Sold in 1891 and taken to Oberammergau, it will be purchased by the government in 1980 and re-erected in the park at Linderhof after extensive restoration.)

Inside the palace, iconography reflects Ludwig's fascination with the absolutist government of Ancien Régime France.

Ludwig sees himself as the "Moon King", a romantic shadow of the earlier "Sun King", Louis XIV of France.

From Linderhof, Ludwig enjoys moonlit sleigh rides in an elaborate eighteenth-century sleigh, complete with footmen in eighteenth century livery.

Also in 1878, construction begins on his Versailles-derived Herrenchiemsee.

King Ludwig’s plans proceed undeterred in the 1880s.

He plans construction of a new castle on Falkenstein ("Falcon Rock") near Pfronten in the Allgäu (a place he knows well: a diary entry for 16 October 1867 reads "Falkenstein wild, romantic").

The first design had been a sketch by Christian Jank in 1883 "very much like the Townhall of Liege" (Kreisel 1954, p. 82).

Subsequent designs show a modest villa with a square tower (Dollmann 1884) and a small Gothic castle (Schultze 1884, Hofmann 1886), as well as a Byzantine palace in the Graswangtal and a Chinese summer palace by the Plansee in Tyrol.

By 1885, a road and water supply had been provided at Falkenstein but the old ruins remain untouched; the other projects will never get beyond initial plans.

The rebellious cabinet minsters of Ludwig II of Bavaria, seeking a cause to depose the king by constitutional means, decide on the rationale that he is mentally ill, and unable to rule.

They have asked Ludwig's uncle, Prince Luitpold, to step into the royal vacancy once Ludwig is deposed.

Luitpold had agreed, so long as the conspirators produce reliable proof that the king is in fact hopelessly insane.

Between January and March 1886, the conspirators assemble the Ärztliches Gutachten, or Medical Report, on Ludwig's fitness to rule.

Most of the details in the report are compiled by Count von Holnstein, who is disillusioned with Ludwig and actively seeks his downfall.

Holnstein uses his high rank and bribery to extract a long list of complaints, accounts, and gossip about Ludwig from among the king's servants.

The litany of supposed bizarre behavior includes his pathological shyness, his avoidance of state business, his complex and expensive flights of fancy, dining out of doors in cold weather and wearing heavy overcoats in summer, sloppy and childish table manners; dispatching servants on lengthy and expensive voyages to research architectural details in foreign lands; and abusive, violent threats to his servants.

The conspirators approach the Imperial Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, who doubts the report's veracity, calling it "rakings from the King's wastepaper-basket and cupboards." (Blunt, Wilfred; Petzet, Michael. The Dream King: Ludwig II of Bavaria. p. 216 (1970))

Bismarck comments after reading the Report that "the Ministers wish to sacrifice the King, otherwise they have no chance of saving themselves," and suggests that the matter be brought before the Bavarian Diet and discussed in a session of Parliament, but does not stop the ministers from carrying out their plan.

Although Ludwig had paid for his pet projects out of his own funds and not the state coffers, that had not necessarily spared Bavaria from financial fallout.

By 1885, the king was fourteen million marks in debt, had borrowed heavily from his family, and rather than economizing, as his financial ministers had advised him, he has undertaken new opulence and new designs without pause.

He had demanded that loans be sought from all of Europe's royalty, and had remained aloof from matters of state.

Feeling harassed and irritated by his ministers, he had considered dismissing the entire cabinet and replacing them with fresh faces.

The cabinet had decided to act first.

A panel of four psychiatrists sign the finalized Medical Report on Kudwig II's mental state in early June: Dr. Bernhard von Gudden, chief of the Munich Asylum; Dr. Hubert von Grashey (who is Gudden's son-in-law); and their colleagues, a Dr. Hagen and a Dr. Hubrich.

The report declares in its final sentences that the king suffers from paranoia, and concludes, "Suffering from such a disorder, freedom of action can no longer be allowed and Your Majesty is declared incapable of ruling, which incapacity will be not only for a year's duration, but for the length of Your Majesty's life."

The men had never met the king except Gudden, once, twelve years earlier, nor examined him.