  We establish the local existence and uniqueness of solutions to the
free-boundary ideal compressible magnetohydrodynamic equations with surface
tension in three spatial dimensions by a suitable modification of the
Nash--Moser iteration scheme. The main ingredients in proving the convergence
of the scheme are the tame estimates and unique solvability of the linearized
problem in the anisotropic Sobolev spaces $H_*^m$ for $m$ large enough. In
order to derive the tame estimates, we make full use of the boundary regularity
enhanced from the surface tension. The unique solution of the linearized
problem is constructed by designing some suitable $\varepsilon$--regularization
and passing to the limit $\varepsilon\to 0$.
