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This etext was prepared by A Elizabeth Warren MD, Sacramento,CA; aewarren2@aol.com
NOTE from AEWarren: I am not able to reproduce the themes("Motivs" or "Motive")
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
More than a dozen years ago musical scholars and critics began toilluminate the musical darkness of New York with lecture-recitalsexplanatory of the more abstruse German operas. Previous to this era no onehad ever thought, for instance, of unfolding the story, or the "Leitmotive" (if there happened to be any!), in "The Bohemian Girl,""Maritana," or "Martha." These and many other delightful but thoroughlythird-class works unfolded themselves as they went along, to the entiresatisfaction of a public so unbelievably care-free, happy, thoughtless,childlike, uninstructed, that it hardly seems as if they could have beenour ancestors.
Wagner changed all this at a single blow. One could no longer leave one'sbrains with one's hat in the coat-room when the "Nibelungen Ring"appeared!Learned critics, pitifully comprehending the fathomless ignorance of thepeople, began to give lectures on the "Ring" to large audiences, mostly ofladies, through whom in course of time a certain amount of informationpercolated and reached the husbands—the somewhat circuitous, but onlypossible method by which aesthetic knowledge can be conveyed to theAmerican male. Women are hopeless idealists! It is not enough for them thattheir brothers or husbands should pay for the seats at the opera andaccompany them there, clad in irreproachable evening dress. Not at all!They wish them to sit erect, keep awake, and look intelligent, and it isbut just to say that many of them succeed in doing so. The art-form knownas the lecture-recital, then, has succeeded in forcibly educating so largea section of the public that immense audiences gather at the MetropolitanOpera House, one-half of them at least, in a state of such chastenedsusceptibility and erudition that the Tetralogy of Wagner has no terrorsfor them.
The next move was in behalf of the more cryptic, symbolic, hectic, toxicworks of the ultra-modern French school, which have been so brilliantlyilluminated by their protagonists that thousands of women in the largercities recognize a master's voice whenever one of his themes is played uponthe Victrola.
I shall offer my practically priceless manuscript of "Bluebeard" forproduction in French at the Metropolitan, and in English at the CenturyOpera House; meantime Mr. Hammerstein is so impressed with its originality,audacity, and tragic power that he is laying the corner-stone for amagnificent new building and will open and close it with "Bluebeard" inGerman, if no unforeseen legal complications should prevent.
It is in preparation for all this activity that I issue this brief butepoch-making little work.
KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN. NEW YORK, February, 1914.
Bluebe