The Flying Dutchman

Wagner gave the manuscript to King Ludwig II of Bavaria after the performance of the opera in the Munich Court and National Theatre on 4 December 1864, which he conducted himself; 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.