FullReads

This scene runs the gamut of human emotion. The universe is mirrored in it. First, one of the themes which we have noted, and then another, is sounded, bringing to the bearer’s mind all the crucial moments of Bluebeard’s strange, perverted, wife-pursuing life, as well as all the aspirations and disappointments of Fatima’s ambitious but checkered career. All the while that this complicated web of motives is being woven out of unresolved dissonances, the thirty first violins keep on playing the same three notes in ever-precipitated rhythms. This is radical, audacious, and effective. The notes are G flat, A sharp, and B natural, and the world reels as we hear them. Everything is ours in this scene–orchestration, vocalization, dramatization, characterization, gesticulation, auditory inflammation, cacophonation, demoralization, adumbration.

There is an abrupt change of key after the “Honeymoon Motive” from sweetest major to a piercing minor. This is exquisitely sincere and symbolic, though it is a point too delicate to be perceived save by musicians who have married but have not been able to hang up their wives. The libretto goes on to say:

“The honeymoon passed when a letter one day
“Upon urgent affairs called Lord Bluebeard away–
“To inspection, sweet love, all my castle I leave,
“But remember with this key be on the qui_vive!
“It is not a natural key–think of that!
“My sword’s in the key of one sharp, and that’s flat!
“(Then he half drew his blade, and it was sharp and flat.)”

From this point the music-drama hastens tragically to a close. We have Bluebeard’s sudden (and feigned) journey, introduced by a pompous march of great originality:

MARCH (Pomposo. Decrescendo…..sempre p pp ppp)

Then we have the fatal curiosity of Fatima and her sister Anne. We must extenuate here, nor aught set down in malice, remembering that Wagner knew only the women of his own day, before the sex was uplifted and purified by the vote, and he naturally depicted them with the man-engendered vices that were then a part of their unhappy heritage. This “Neugierde_Motiv” (Curiosity Motive) is made up of agitated, sharply accentuated sixteenth notes played with incredible vivacity and culminating in a terrifying orchestral crash where entrance is made into the hidden chamber, with its famous tableau so eloquent of the polygamous instinct of man; an instinct only kept in subjection by the most stringent laws and the most militant domestic discipline.

ANTI-FEMINIST ARIA

“But Fatima said, ‘To the keyhole let’s creep,
“There can be no harm just in one little peep!
“We are women–besides, there are none to behold us!
“If he wished us to leave it, he shouldn’t have told us!'”

It is these inexcusable lines which have caused the Feminist party to boycott (and perhaps rightly) any opera-house in which this drama is given, urging that they contain an insult which can be wiped out only with blood or ballots. I sympathize with this feeling, yet, as I said before, there are extenuating circumstances. Wagner was born a hundred years ago. In his time the hand of woman, though white, was flabby and inert from years of darning, patching, stirring the pot, buttoning and unbuttoning, feeding and spanking man’s perennial progeny. He had no conception how that frail hand would be steadied and strengthened by dropping the ballot into the box; how curiosity, vanity, parasitic coquetry, lack of logic, overweening interest in millinery and inability to balance a check-book–how these weaknesses would vanish under the inspiring influences of municipal politics; therefore I feel disposed to forgive him, and to attribute to him, not absolute and deliberate insult, so much as a kind of patronizing persiflage. In this case, however, feminists will say that the great Wagner undoubtedly and regrettably overreached himself.

Here is just a hint of the theme; a paltry, parasitic, mid-Victorian motive.

CURIOSITY ARIA

Curiosity conquer’d, the Key was applied,
And with thunder most awful the door opened wide.