s, for many years a factotum at the Bayreuth festivals.
It was her father's devotion to Wagner which gave her the name of Elsa.
She married a lawyer and litterateur in Munich named Bernstein, and has
written a number of plays besides "Konigskinder," which she published
in 1895, and afterward asked Herr Humperdinck (not yet a royal Prussian
professor, but a simple musician, who had made essays in criticisms and
tried to make a composer out of Siegfried Wagner) to provide with
incidental music. Mr. Humperdinck took his task seriously. The play,
with some incidental music, was two years old before Mr. Humperdinck
had his overture ready. He had tried a new experiment, which proved a
failure. The second and third acts had their preludes, and the songs of
the minstrel had their melodies and accompaniments, and all the
principal scenes had been provided with illustrative music in the
Wagnerian manner, with this difference, that the dialogue had been
"pointed," as a church musician would say--that is, the rhythm was
indicated with exactness, and even the variations of pitch, though it
was understood that the purpose was not to achieve song, but an
intensified utterance, halfway between speech and song. This was
melodrama, as Herr Humperdinck conceived it and as it had no doubt
existed for ages--ever since the primitive Greek drama, in fact. It is
easy to understand how Herr Humperdinck came to believe in the
possibility of an art-form which, though accepted, for temporary
effect, by Beethoven and Cherubini, and used for ballads with greater
or less success by Schumann, had been harshly rejected by his great
model and master, Wagner. Humperdinck lives in Germany, where in nearly
every theatre there is more or less of an amalgamation of the spoken
drama and the opera--where choristers play small parts and actors,
though not professional singers, sing when not too much is required of
them. And yet Herr Humperdinck found out that he had asked too much of
his actors with his "pointed" and at times intoned declamation, and
"Konigskinder" did not have to come to America to learn that the
compromise was a failure. No doubt Herr Humperdinck thought of turning
so beautiful a play into an opera then, but it seems to have required
the stimulus which finally came from New York to persuade him to carry
out the operatic idea, which is more than suggested in the score as it
lies before me in its original shape, into a thorough lyric drama. The