Die Walküre

Wagner presented the manuscript to King Ludwig II of Bavaria on his birthday on 25 August 1866.

Richard Wagner had presented the manuscripts (except for the leaf from the ‘Lohengrin’ compositional sketch) to King Ludwig II of Bavaria on various occasions. Sold to the Reich Chamber of Commerce by the Wittelsbach Equalisation Fund in April 1939, which gave it to Hitler on 20 April 1939 for his 50th birthday; at the end of the war, the manuscripts were presumed to be in the ‘Führerbunker’ in Berlin. Since then whereabouts unknown. A Munich journalist surmised that Richard Wagner's lost manuscripts may have ended up in the former Soviet Union. A second assumption speaks in favour of their destruction.