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