The Elephant & The Dragon (_basses_). Introduced simply as corroborative
detail.

Chorus of Bluebeard's Vassals (_baritones_and_basses_).

Chorus of Headless Wives (_sopranos_and_contraltos_).

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, _Die_Fliegende_Bla'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 a hat-box
in which it had lain for nearly half a century, unsuspected, undisturbed.