Bluebeard | Page 4

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.
The next move was in behalf of the more cryptic, symbolic, hectic,
toxic works of the ultra-modern French school, which have been so
brilliantly illuminated by their protagonists that thousands of women in
the larger cities recognize a master's voice whenever one of his themes
is played upon the Victrola.
I shall offer my practically priceless manuscript of "Bluebeard" for
production in French at the Metropolitan, and in English at the Century
Opera House; meantime Mr. Hammerstein is so impressed with its
originality, audacity, and tragic power that he is laying the corner-stone
for a magnificent new building and will open and close it with
"Bluebeard" in German, if no unforeseen legal complications should
prevent.
It is in preparation for all this activity that I issue this brief but
epoch-making little work.
KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN. NEW YORK, February, 1914.

CAST OF CHARACTERS

Bluebeard (baritone). Man of enormous wealth but dubious morals.
Pioneer of the trial-marriage idea.
Fatima (singingactress). Innocent, romantic, frivolous blonde type, rich
in personal charm, weak in logic and a poor judge of men.
Sister Anne (soprano). Impulsive, magnetic, ambitious, highly
marriageable brunette.
The Mother (contralto). Impecunious, mercenary widow, determined to
settle her daughters in life without any regard to eugenic principles.
Mustapha (robusttenor). Elder brother; the one who has the fat acting
part since he rescues Fatima and slays Bluebeard.
Other Brothers (falsettos). Of no account save to show the size of the
family to which Fatima belongs and her mother's sound convictions on
the subject of race suicide. The other brothers have nothing to do
except to slay sheep (by accident) when attempting to destroy
Bluebeard's tiger and elephant.
The Tiger (throatybaritone). Comic character.
The Elephant & The Dragon (basses). Introduced simply as
corroborative detail.
Chorus of Bluebeard's Vassals (baritonesandbasses).
Chorus of Headless Wives (sopranosandcontraltos).
Chorus of Sheep (tenors).
Bluebeard
(Lecture-Recital)
WE are proceeding on the supposition that this music-drama of
"Bluebeard" is a posthumous work of Richard Wagner. It is said (our
authority being a late number of the musical and Court Journal,

DieFliegendeBla'tter) that a housemaid, while tidying one of the rooms
in a villa formerly occupied by the Wagner family in summer, perceived
an enormous halo shining persistently over a certain bedstead standing
against the wall, the said halo absolutely refusing to remove itself when
attacked with a feather- duster. The housemaid thought at first that it
was simply an effect of the sunlight, but observed subsequently that the
halo was just as large, fine yellow, opaque, and circular on dark days
as on bright ones; consequently, on a certain morning when it was so
huge and glaring as to be positively offensive to the eye, inasmuch as it
did not hang over a Holy Family, but over an ordinary and somewhat
uncomfortable article of furniture, she adopted the courageous
feminine expedient of looking underneath the bed, where she found this
priceless legacy of the master reposing in