“A composer’s studio... The rising young composer, Gerald Marvin, is tearing up and down his room in an awful state...”
A temperamental young composer thinks he will “go mad” if he can’t identify the source of a melody running through his head. He wants to use it in the finale of a sonata he is composing–but, he says, only if it is his own. His long suffering wife tries to help. Enter a Spanish peddler and seamstress who, while working on a button, quietly begins to sing a song that changes everything.
This short play is included in the collection Thornton Wilder's Playlets: Short, Short Plays for 3-5 Persons.
This playlet, written in 1918, was published for the first time in 2009. Here, Wilder revisits the question he explored in Centaurs, also written in 1918: What are the sources-and the “ownership”–of artistic themes and ideas?