It had been known as a spoken play for twelve years and three of its musical numbers--the overture and two pieces of between-acts music--had been in local concert-lists for the same length of time.

The play had been presented with incidental music for many of the scenes as well as the overture and entr'actes in 1898 in an extremely interesting production at the Irving Place Theatre, then under the direction of Heinrich Conried, in which Agnes Sorma and Rudolf Christians had carried the principal parts.

It came back four years later in an English version at the Herald Square Theatre, but neither in the German nor the English performance was it vouchsafed us to realize what had been the purpose of the author of the play and the composer of the music.
The author, who calls herself Ernst Rosmer, is a woman, daughter of Heinrich Forges, 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.