However, it was the old story! Moved by love, ambition, poverty, ennui, or what not, Fatima lost her head, as all Bluebeard's previous wives had done, both before and after marriage, and left the humble home of her childhood for the unknown castle. Simple chords give us this information thus:
(Semplice, piano for the Humble Home; Agitato, fortissimo for the Unknown Castle.)Then comes the "_Liebesgruss_Motiv_" (Love's Greeting Motive). No single instrument can give this exquisite theme. The whole symphony of human nature seems to rise and spread its wings in a glorious harmony of pairs and twos of a kind melting in passionate octaves and triplets. The groping, ardent, distracted, thwarted, but ever protesting bass, set against a coquettish, evasive, yet timidly yielding treble; the occasional introduction of a mysterious minor in the midst of a well-authenticated major, gives us an intimation that wooing is not an exact science.
Next come the "_Hochzeitsreise_und_Flitter_Wochen_Motive_" (The Bridal Tour and Honeymoon motives). Here are harp _glissandos_; here are voices soaring, voices roaring, voices darting, voices floating, weaving an audible embroidery of sound. They make up the most exquisitely tender scene of the opera, and arc especially interesting to us in America, since they are built upon one of our national songs. This can only be regarded as a flattering recognition of our support of German opera in this country.
ARIA
"Midst the treasures of his palaces, dee-lighted to roam, "Sister Anne with fair Fatima explored their new home!
"Home! Home! Sweet, sweet Home!
"There's no place like home when a maid's too poor to roam!"It is later on in this act that we have the celebrated "Hope Motive," a marvelous series of tone-pictures so novel and sensational that many box-holders are expected to drop in at ten-thirty for the excitement of this one brief scene. The motive wanders from key to key, hoping that in the end it will hit off the right one. Fatima is hoping to find her ideal in Bluebeard. Sister Anne is hoping to get a handsomer husband than Fatima's;Blue-beard is hoping that Sister Anne will be his eighth spouse, and hoping that there will be room to hang her in the hidden chamber, in which his deceased wives are already pressed for room. All this is reflected in the voices of the singers, together with many other emotions. They hope that they will be able to come in just enough after or enough before, the usual time of entrance, to rivet the conductor's attention; that they will be preserved from falling into one another's parts; that they will not be drowned by the orchestra; that they will be able to mount the dizzying heights of a precipitous chromatic scale and manage an unrehearsed descent in fifths on the half-notes--something that always causes intense joy in an uneducated audience, especially when it is unsuccessful.
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.
