The King's Henchman
Vernon, Grenville
492 THE KING'S HENCHMAN By GRENVILLE VERNON WHETHER or not The King's Henchman, the lyric drama by Deems Taylor and Edna St. Vincent Millay produced recently with astonishing success at the...
...William Gustafson as Maccus and George Meader as the Archbishop Dunstan were both admirable, and the lesser parts were capably taken...
...Miss Florence Easton was exceEent vocally, though visually she was scarcely fitted to impersonate the vain and youthful beauty of the forests of Devon...
...He has also employed one old English folksong with admirable effect...
...Taylor is not yet that composer is perhaps true, but that he is not has nothing to do with the story he has chosen...
...It is to be hoped that in his next opera that stamp will appear as it has not appeared in The King's Henchman, but at least until it does let us be grateful for the fact that America has at last produced a musician who knows the requirements of the theatre, and a librettist who is a poet of singular beauty and nobility...
...Taylor is therefore in his opera an eclectic...
...The result has been one of the most interesting operatic novelties of recent years, a work which if on the musical side possessing no particular personal note or originality of utterance, is yet in a theatrical sense extraordinarily effective...
...Setti's chorus, in the scenic investiture of Josef Urban, the Metropolitan put its best foot forward...
...It is primarily melodic, and it is based fundamentally on the diatonic scale, with the occasional employment of more modernistic methods when these methods are effective...
...Throughout, his orchestration is opulent, sonorous, and full of color...
...Serafin's conducting, in the singing of Mr...
...The tumultuous applause which rocked the walls of the staid old Metropolitan on the night of Thursday, February 17, was neither the evocation of a claque nor a merely friendly greeting to a worthy patriotic effort—it was the spontaneous recognition of a dramatic and stirring work such as no living composer might have been ashamed to have produced, and very few living librettists could have produced...
...In Mr...
...That Mr...
...Whatever may be its ultimate fate, and operatic works are notoriously short of life, it has destroyed once and for all the twin superstitions that no Anglo-Saxon composer can write an effective opera, and that the English language is unfitted for lyric song...
...To the part of King Edgar, Lawrence Tibbett gave the full resources of his admirable voice, a fine dignity of bearing, and a diction of unusual clarity, while Edward Johnson's Aethelwold possessed all the authority and skill in vocal delineation which American audiences have learned to expect from this artist...
...Any composer who writes music personal to him writes music of the country to which he belongs...
...His writing for the choruses is masterly, and though there are no set lyric melodies which will be remembered, he has written admirably for the voice...
...It is in the love music of the second act that he is least successful...
...I have said that Mr...
...Tristan is the story of a British hero and an Irish princess, and Aida is laid in ancient Egypt, yet both are among the supreme glories of the German and Italian lyric drama...
...There have been some voices raised proclaiming that because The King's Henchman has for a setting the forests of AngloSaxon England that it is therefore not truly an American opera...
...Taylor's score possesses no particular originality of utterance, but it is none the less the score of a 493 musician of unusual powers...
...Who is to say what is or what is not American music until such a composer arrives...
...It lacked, perhaps, a little of the heroic quality of an Anglo-Saxon hero, but it was poetic and at times even inspired...
...If in his next opera Mr...
...Taylor produces a score which bears his personal stamp, that opera will be American, whether that stamp takes the form of melody or of dissonance...
...Taylor has in it proved himself a master of the technical side of his craft, a composer perfectly at home in the theatre, with a sure knowledge both of its possibilities and its limitations...
...The performance was worthy of the work...
...Vincent Millay produced recently with astonishing success at the Metropolitan Opera House, is to be the precursor of a school of veritable American opera, the fact remains that it is by all odds the most effective work of its kind which has yet come from the pen of an American musician...
...The final pages of the opera are, on the other hand, the best, for though these are also Wagnerian in spirit, the nobility of Miss Millay's poetry apparently inspired the composer to trust more freely to his own invention...
...It is not the plot which counts, but the settors...
...Here the feeling will not down that rinding his own fount of emotion running dry he has drawn great drafts from the pages of the great Richard without transmuting them in his own imagination...
...And as for Miss Millay's libretto, it possesses in addition a nobility of thought and utterance such as shown by no operatic work of recent years with the one exception of L'Amore dei tre Re...
...He has borrowed from Puccini, from Debussy, but most of all from Wagner...
...and Miss Millay has produced a libretto combining a high literary and poetic excellence with a choice of words suited for musical investiture...
...This is, of course, absurd...
Vol. 5 • March 1927 • No. 18
