[Portions of this header are copyright (C) 2001 by Michael S. Hart and may be reprinted only when these Etexts are free of all fees.] [Project Gutenberg is a TradeMark and may not be used in any sales of Project Gutenberg Etexts or other materials be they hardware or software or any other related product without express permission.]
This etext was prepared by A Elizabeth Warren MD, Sacramento, CA; aewarren2@aol.com
NOTE from AEWarren: I am not able to reproduce the themes ("Motivs" or "Motive")
BLUEBEARD
A Musical Fantasy
by Kate Douglas Wiggin
Dedication: To my friend Walter Damrosch
Master of the art form so irreverently treated in these pages.
Kate Douglas Wiggin
PREFACE
More than a dozen years ago musical scholars and critics began to illuminate the musical darkness of New York with lecture-recitals explanatory of the more abstruse German operas. Previous to this era no one had ever thought, for instance, of unfolding the story, or the "Leit motive" (if there happened to be any!), in "The Bohemian Girl," "Maritana," or "Martha." These and many other delightful but thoroughly third-class works unfolded themselves as they went along, to the entire satisfaction of a public so unbelievably care-free, happy, thoughtless, childlike, uninstructed, that it hardly seems as if they could have been our ancestors.
Wagner changed all this at a single blow. One could no longer leave one's brains with one's hat in the coat-room when the "Nibelungen Ring"appeared! Learned critics, pitifully comprehending the fathomless ignorance of the people, began to give lectures on the "Ring" to large audiences, mostly of ladies, through whom in course of time a certain amount of information percolated and reached the husbands—the somewhat circuitous, but only possible method by which aesthetic knowledge can be conveyed to the American male. Women are hopeless idealists! It is not enough for them that their brothers or husbands should pay for the seats at the opera and accompany them there, clad in irreproachable evening dress. Not at all! They wish them to sit erect, keep awake, and look intelligent, and it is but just to say that many of them succeed in doing so. The art-form known as the lecture-recital, then, has succeeded in forcibly educating so large a section of the public that immense audiences gather at the Metropolitan Opera House, one-half of them at least, in a state of such chastened susceptibility and erudition that the Tetralogy of Wagner has no terrors for them.