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.