Bluebeard; a musical fantasy

Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin

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The Project Gutenberg Etext of Bluebeard, by Kate Douglas Wiggin #19 in our series by Kate Douglas WigginCopyright laws are changing all over the world; be sure to check the laws for your country before redistributing thesefiles!!!Please take a look at the important information in this header. We encourage you to keep this file on your own disk,keeping an electronic path open for the next readers.Please do not remove this.This should be the first thing seen when anyone opens the book. Do not change or edit it without written permission. Thewords are carefully chosen to provide users with the information they need about what they can legally do with the texts.**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts****Etexts Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971***These Etexts Prepared By Hundreds of Volunteers and Donations*Information on contacting Project Gutenberg to get Etexts, and further information is included below. We need yourdonations.Presently, contributions are only being solicited from people in: Texas, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado,South Dakota, Iowa, Indiana, and Vermont. As the requirements for other states are met, additions to this list will bemade and fund raising will begin in the additional states. These donations should be made to:Project Gutenberg Literary Archive FoundationPMB 1131739 University Ave.Oxford, MS 38655Title: BluebeardAuthor: Kate Douglas WigginRelease Date: October, 2002 [Etext ...

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• Publié par: chawyag
• Publié le: 08 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 57
• Langue: English

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The Project Gutenberg Etext of Bluebeard, by Kate Douglas Wiggin #19 in our series by Kate Douglas Wiggin Copyright laws are changing all over the world; be sure to check the laws for your country before redistributing these files!!! t P h l i e s  a h s e e  a t d a e k r e .   a W  l e o   o e k n   c at o   u t r h a e  g i e m  y p o o u rt  t a o n   t k  i e n e fo p r  t m hi a s t   i f o il n e     i o n n your own disk, keeping an electronic path open for the next readers. Please do not remove this. This should be the first thing seen when anyone opens the book. Do not change or edit it without written permission. The words are carefully chosen to provide users with the information they need about what they can legally do with the texts. **Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts** **Etexts Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971** *These Etexts Prepared By Hundreds of Volunteers and Donations* Information on contacting Project Gutenberg to get Etexts, and further information is included below. We need your donations. Presently, contributions are only being solicited from people in: Texas, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, South Dakota, Iowa, Indiana, and Vermont. As the requirements for other states are met, additions to this list will be made and fund raising will begin in the additional states. These donations should be made to: Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation PMB 113 1 O 7 x 3 fo 9 r   d U ,  ni M ve S r   s 3 it 8 y 6   5 A 5 ve. Title: Bluebeard Author: Kate Douglas Wiggin [ R Y e e l s e , a   s w e e     D ar a e t   e a :  b O o c u t t o  o b n e e r,     y 2 e 0 a 0 r  2 a  [ h E e t a e d x   t  o # f  3 s 4 c 9 h 4 e ] dule] Edition: 10 The Project Gutenberg Etext of Bluebeard, by Kate Douglas Wiggin ******This file should be named blbrd10.txt or blbrd10.zip****** Corrected EDITIONS of our etexts get a new NUMBER, blbrd11.txt VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, blbrd10a.txt

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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. 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. t It h   i i s s    i b n r   i p e r f  e b p u a t r   a e t p io o n c   h f - or m   a al k l  i t n h g i   s li   t a tl c e t   iv w it o y r   k t . hat I issue KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN. NEW YORK, February, .4191 CAST OF CHARACTERS Bluebeard (baritone). Man of enormous wealth but dubious morals. Pioneer of the trial-marriage idea. Fatima (_singing_actress_). Innocent, romantic, frivolous blonde type, rich in personal charm, weak in logic and a poor judge of men. a Si m st b e it r i   o A u n s n ,  e h   i ( g s h o l p y r   a m n a o r ) r . i   a I g m e p a u b l l s e i   v b e r ,  u m ne a t g te n . etic, The Mother (contralto). Impecunious, mercenary widow, determined to settle her daughters in life without any regard to eugenic principles. Mustapha (_robust_tenor_). 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 (_throaty_baritone_). Comic character. 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. If this incident is true it is exquisitely pretty and touching; if not, it is highly absurd and ridiculous, but the same may be said of many hypothetical historical incidents. At all events, the financial arrangements which followed upon the discovery of the MS. and the price demanded for it by the Wagnerian housemaid convinces me absolutely of its authenticity. To me it is not strange that Wagner should choose to immortalize the story of Bluebeard, for the interesting and inspiring myth has been used in all ages and in all countries. It differs slightly in the various versions. In some, the shade of the villain's beard is robin's-egg and in others indigo; in some the fatal key is blood-stained instead of broken; while in the matter of wives the myth varies according to the customs of the locality where it appears: In monogamous countries the number of ladies slain is generally six, but in bigamous and polygamous countries the interesting victims mount (they were always hung high, you remember) to the number of one hundred and seventeen. I ought, perhaps, to confess to you that there are critics who still deny the authenticity of this work, although they concede that it is full of Wagner's spirit and influence and may have been produced by some ardent follower or pupil; one steeped to the eyebrows in mythologic lore and capable of hurling titanic tonal eccentricities against the uncomprehending ear-drum of the dull and ignorant herd. There are those, too, who think that some disciple of Richard II.,—Strauss, not Wagner,—had a hand in the orchestration, simply because his "Sinfonia Domestica" occupies itself with the same sweet history of the inglenook which is the basis of the Bluebeard libretto. Strauss's symphony is worked out along more tranquil lines, to be sure, but it is only the history of a single day of married life and a day arbitrarily chosen by the