American Opera at the Met
A Look at 1910-1935
By Robert Wilder Blue

Introduction
When John Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles arrived at the Metropolitan Opera on December 19, 1991, the current generation of operagoers greeted it as a stranger in that house; more than twenty-four years had passed since the company had presented a world premiere. It was an era that saw the company produce only two American operas (George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess on its main stage and Virgil Thomson/Gertrude Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts at the Mini-Met) and only two operas written in the second half of the century (Benjamin Britten’s Death in Venice and Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites). There is no single nor quick explanation for this absence (the numerous possible reasons have been discussed ad infinitum in the media; to rehash it all again would be time-consuming and uninteresting); although in defense of the Met, it can be pointed out that its repertory mirrored for the most part the state of opera presentation in the U.S. between the mid-‘60s and the early ‘90s. But when Mr. Corigliano passed through the door he opened it wide enough to allow others in behind him. The Met presented four more American works during the next twelve seasons (including two more world premieres); only three seasons since 1991 have not included an American opera.

American composers began writing operas in the early 18th century; Philadelphians had seen a number of native works beginning in the 1750s; Bostonians and New Yorkers got their first tastes not long thereafter. The earliest efforts were often “borrowed” from existing European (particularly English) models; the stories were adapted or taken whole; the music was a compilation of original material, existing concert and operatic music and popular songs of the day. Completely original American operas, i.e., operas with original music composed specifically for original libretti appeared in the mid-19th century. Of these, New Yorkers would have had the opportunity to see William Henry Fry’s Leonore (1845), George F. Briston’s Rip Van Winkle (1855) and Walter Damrosch’s The Scarlet Letter (1896). (Elsewhere in the U.S., Chicago’s local composer Silas G. Pratt had achieved success with Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra. African-American composers also got into the game: the prolific Harry Lawrence Freeman saw his first opera The Martyr (1893) premiered in Denver and Scott Joplin’s A Guest of Honor (1903) was given in St. Louis.)

In The Beginning
The founders of the Met were a renegade bunch of new millionaires. Opera had been performed in New York since 1854 at the Academy of Music on 14th Street; twenty-five years later, however, there were not enough boxes at the Academy to accommodate the requests of the nouvelle riche. Summoning their all-American chutzpah and can-do spirit, several opera-loving businessmen organized themselves to form the Metropolitan Opera House Company, Ltd, with the purpose of finding suitable land on which to erect an opera house and an architect to build it. By 1883 the company had a new theater on 39th Street between Broadway and Seventh Avenue; boxes were assigned at a stockholders meeting on May 24, 1883, and theater impresario Henry E. Abbey was hired to run the house.

The Metropolitan Opera House opened on October 22, 1883, with the popular 24-year-old French opera, Faust (Charles Gounod). Of the twenty operas presented during the first season, sixteen had been written in the previous fifty years. (The Met’s repertory today looks remarkably similar to that first season 119 years ago; while time has marched on the operatic repertory has stayed pretty much in the same place.) The company’s first fifty seasons were adventuresome, including eighteen world premieres (thirteen by American composers) and 78 U.S. premieres.

Over its 119-year history, the Met has presented American operas in roughly one-third of its seasons. The richest period by far though was the Gatti-Casazza era (1908-35), when the Met set a mandate for itself to present an American opera every season. (Gatti-Casazza had also convinced Claude Debussy and Giacomo Puccini to write new operas for the company. The deal with Debussy fell through, but Puccini made good on his bargain, mention of which is made below.) In only his second season as general manager, Giulio Gatti-Gasazza offered the company premiere of the one-act opera, The Pipe of Desire, by Boston composer Frederick Shepherd Converse and librettist George Edward Barton. It was the first opera ever given in English at the Met and the first by an American composer.

Converse was not unknown to the New York public; various instrumental pieces had been played by local organizations over the previous five or so years. The Pipe of Desire was his first opera; its premiere had taken place in Boston three years earlier. A few days before the Met production opened, Richard Aldrich had this to say in The New York Times:

The plot of The Pipe of Desire presented a story of peasant lovers, Iolan and Naola, and the playing of a magic pipe possessed by a fairy king, The Old One. This breach of the laws between humans and fairies causes the death of Naola; Iolan is at first outraged but then is purified by his suffering and, in the truest of operatic traditions, dies. Mr. Aldrich described the opera:

The Met’s premiere took place on March 18, 1910; it was conducted by Alfred Hertz and the principal roles were taken by Americans: soprano Louise Homer played Naola, tenor Riccardo Martin was Iolan, baritone Clarence Whitehill (in his company debut) was The Old One. (Also in the cast was baritone Herbert Witherspoon, who after eight seasons at the Met went on to a distinguished teaching career at The Juilliard School. He was chosen to succeed Gatti-Casazza in 1935 but died of heart failure a few days after assuming position, leaving his assistant, Met tenor Edward Johnson, to take over the position.) In his review, Mr. Aldrich found the first performance to be “excellent…prepared with much pains and was carried through with real devotion by all…. Everything, in fact, had been done for the opera to set it forth in the most advantageous way.” He found similarities to Richard Wagner, both in the various characters and in the music. (Wagner’s musical influence was to be found in many American operas of this time, especially in the use of the leitmotiv, or the musical motive given to characters, props, emotional underpinnings, past histories and future destinies.) Aldrich didn’t like Barton’s libretto: “the events that are set forth…are not clearly intelligible nor do they result in carrying the listener’s interest on from one point to the next. There is, in fact, a great dearth of action…. Nor are the personages deeply interesting….” He was kinder to Mr. Converse, whom he found to have “accomplished his task with far more skill and certainty of touch…. His music is not only poetical and often beautiful in itself; it has dramatic force and suggestion, and qualities that fitly characterize the personages of the drama, the situations the prevailing mood and emotion.” Aldrich thought it significant that the leading roles were taken by Americans, but was discouraged “that these English-speaking singers had so little success in making their words understood.” Finally, he noted that “the audience listened with close attention throughout, and at the end gave very cordial and long-continued applause to the singers and the conductor, and to Mr. Converse. The composer was called before the curtain many times.” (Times, March 19, 1910.)

On its opening night The Pipe of Desire was followed by Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci; at the second performance it was preceded by Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana and followed by Alexander Glazunov’s ballet, Hungary (danced by Anna Pavlova and Mikail Mordkin who were in their debut seasons with the company); at the third and final performance, the opera was sandwiched between two ballets, Awakening of Woman (Edvard Grieg) and a Divertissement. The Met’s performances that week also included Verdi’s Requiem with Emmy Destinn, Ms. Homer, Mr. Martin, Mr. Witherspoon and Arturo Toscanini conducting; Faust with Enrico Caruso, Geraldine Farrar and Adamo Didur; Rossini’s The Barber of Seville with Elvira de Hidalgo and John Forsell, followed by various ballet sequences (both in Brooklyn and at the Met); a double bill of Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel and Delibe’s ballet Coppélia; Verdi’s Aïda with Louise Homer and Mr. Caruso; Massanet’s Manon with Geraldine Farrar, Carl Jörn and Antonio Scotti (in Baltimore) as well as his Werther with Edmond Clément, Ms. Farrar, Alma Gluck (debut season) and Dinh Gilly, followed by two ballet numbers (at the New Theatre in Manhattan); Tchaikowsky’s The Queen of Spades (the company had given its U.S. premiere twelve days earlier) with Emmy Destinn, Leo Slezak (debut season), Ms. Gluck, Mr. Forsell, Anna Meitschik, Mr. Didur and Gustav Mahler conducting; Wagner’s Tannhäuser with Mr. Slezak, Johanna Gadski, Olive Fremstad and Walter Soomer; and Ponchielli’s La Giocanda with Destinn, Caruso, Homer and Pasquale Amato; and, finally, a ballet program at the Waldorf Astoria. Toward the end of the season, Met President Otto Kahn convinced Oscar Hammerstein to close his rival Manhattan Opera House, which in its three years of operation had managed to steal some of the Met’s leading artists.

World Premieres
Barely a month after his first opening night as general manager, Gatti-Casazza announced an American opera competition:

He offered the entrants “the widest latitude in the choice of subject,” with the stipulation that it not have been used previously for an opera and that the opera not have been performed yet elsewhere. The librettist need not be born in the U.S., nor did the subject matter need to be American; but the opera had to be in English. The winner would not only see his/her opera produced at the Met but would receive a monetary prize as well as royalties on the performances. (Times, November 21, 1908.)

An uncredited editorial in the following day’s edition of the paper trumpeted a pessimistic warning: “[c]ompetitions for prizes in literature and music have generally been sad failures.” The writer hoped, however, “to have the production of American opera stimulated by a prize competition…. Mr. Gatti-Casazza’s plan…encourages the belief that the Directors of the Metropolitan Opera House desire to develop a National musical institution, which may have a large and beneficent influence on the growth of musical taste and education.” (Times, November 22, 1908.)

The company’s first two world premieres were actually not of operas by Americans. Puccini’s The Girl of the Golden West and Engelbert Humperdinck’s Königskinder, or The Royal Children bowed eighteen days apart (December 10 and 28, respectively) during the 1910-11 season. Thought not an “American opera,” The Girl of the Golden West nevertheless deserves mention in this history. Ever the armchair traveler, Puccini found the source of his seventh opera in David Belasco’s play of the same name, which brought to dramatic life the raucous times of the California gold rush. It is perhaps the most successful world premiere in the company’s history and has provided some of the Met’s most beloved Puccini singers the opportunity to ride horses, chew tobacco and slug back whiskey at the bar.

The Met gave its first world premiere of an American opera the following season. It was the winner of its competition, Mona, by Horatio Parker and Brian Hooker. Parker was a composer, church organist and choir director in New York and Boston. His early concert works had betrayed a dramatic bent; Mona was his first opera. The story was as operatic as its gets: Mona (a Briton) is in love with Gwynn (a Roman) at a time when the Briton people are under Roman rule. Their love cannot withstand politics, however, and neither governors nor the governed end up happy at the end of the day. Grove Dictionary described the opera:

Opening night was March 14, 1912; Ms. Homer was Mona, Messrs. Martin and Witherspoon played Quintus and Arth, Mona’s foster-father; Maestro Hertz conducted. Audiences were enthusiastic about the piece, critics less so and after four performances the opera disappeared.

Pasquale Amato as Cyrano de Bergerac in Damrosch's Cyrano (1913). Metropolitan Opera Archives.

A Trend
Walter Damrosch had joined the Met during its second season as an assistant conductor under his father Leopold. He made his debut the same season conducting Tannhäuser and over the next seven years was a regular on the podium, particularly leading the operas of Richard Wagner. In 1894 he started the Damrosch Opera Company which for six years toured the U.S. performing Wagner’s operas. He also conducted the New York Symphony Society, a predecessor of the Philharmonic, from 1885-1927; and in 1928 he became the first conductor of the NBC Symphony, a post he retained until 1942. During his tenure at NBC he instituted a series of children’s concerts that would provide a valuable music education for a generation of television watchers.

The Met gave the premieres of two of Damrosch’s operas, Cyrano and The Man Without a Country. After seeing a performance of Edmund Rostand’s play Cyrano de Bergerac in 1902, Damrosch enlisted W.J. Henderson to adapt the play for the opera house. In short time Damrosch had completed the opera and his publisher had engraved the plates; but he became dissatisfied with the fourth act and withdrew the work. Nine years later, Damrosch invited the Directors of the Met and Mr. Gatti-Casazza to his home and gave a reading of the entire first act and excerpts from the second act with singers, a small chorus and himself at the piano. He let them know that he intended to complete the opera and on the basis of that audition the Met decided to produce the work. Damrosch wrote a new fourth act and revised the orchestral score for the entire opera. A February 27, 1913, premiere was announced; Alfred Hertz would again conduct; popular Italian baritone Pasquale Amato would sing the title role; New Zealand soprano Frances Alda and Riccardo Martin were slated to play Roxane and the letter-writing Christian.

A week before the premiere, Mr. Rostand surfaced (via cable from France) and let the world know he was unhappy that Damrosch and Henderson had used his work without permission. (Rostand’s play was not protected by copyright in the U.S. and therefore the opera’s authors had not operated outside of the law.) The next day, Damrosch told the Times that he was “surprised at Rostand’s ire” and stated that he had “had no correspondence with Mr. Rostand, but my representative wrote to the Society of Dramatic Authors and informed him that, although Cyrano is not copyrighted in America and therefore I could receive no protection by so doing, after Mr. Henderson’s payment is deducted, I should be glad, out of consideration to Mr. Rostand’s genius, to pay him a royalty. The president of the society, Pierre Decourcelle, wrote and thanked me for what he called my ‘generous behavior.’” (Times, February 21-22, 1913.) (Fourteen years earlier, Rostand had filed an injunction against Richard Mansfield to stop production of his play, The Merchant Prince of Cornville, citing plagiarism. The alleged theft involved proxy love-making and a balcony scene. The lawsuit was postponed repeatedly and eventually went untried.)

In the Sunday, February 23, edition of the Times, Cyrano garnered a full-page feature, with illustrations of the scenery and photos of the principal artists. The plot was outlined in great detail; excerpts from the libretto were included. An anonymous editorial proclaimed that “all New York, if not the whole operatic world, is talking about [Cyrano]. This week it will be the uppermost musical subject hereabout, and we sincerely hope it will keep its place in the minds of operagoers until it reaches the age of Rossini’s ‘Barber,’ which is still conspicuously in the repertory, and that it will bear its years as well.” (Times, February 23, 1913.)

On opening night, Cyrano was so enthusiastically received that the composer, librettist and Gatti-Casazza joined the performers at the third-act curtain call. Gatti-Casazza spoke to the audience, thanking them for the reception they had given the first three acts and asking them to remain for the “short” but “most essential” fourth act, after which he would address them again. The reviewer also pointed out that the “company…now contain[ed] enough American and English-speaking singers of high rank to perform such a work competently in the language in which it was written,” although later he complained that the text was not intelligible and that “large portions of it might as well have been in an unknown tongue,” a fault he blamed at least in part on the orchestration. The music was found to have been composed with “skill, verve and spontaneity,” but “lacked inspiration, originality and power.” Damrosch’s debt to Wagner (especially Die Meistersinger) was acknowledged; influences of Verdi and “lesser men” were also noted, as was Damrosch’s obvious familiarity with “modern music.” The performers were praised; the scenery, costumes and direction were found to be “excellent.” (Times, February 28, 1913.) The opera was given five more performances during the season.

What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?
Born in Dublin, Ireland, Victor Herbert studied music in Germany and was a court cellist and composer in Stuttgart. He and his wife, soprano Therese Herbert-Förster, immigrated to the U.S. in 1886 where Herbert played in the Met orchestra and Therese sang two seasons with the company (Aïda, Elsa and Elizabeth, among other roles). Herbert began to make a name for himself as the composer of the popular operettas Babes in Toyland (1903), Naughty Marietta (1910) and Sweethearts (1913) and had composed an opera, Natoma (1911), which had been seen in Chicago, Philadelphia and San Francisco. The Met presented the world premiere of Herbert’s second opera, Madeleine, on January 24, 1914. Successful turn-of-the-century playwright Grant Stewart wrote the libretto (he also wrote libretti for Henry Hadley), based on a French play by A. Decourcelles and L. Thibaut about a popular Parisian prima donna who has trouble finding a New Year’s Day dining companion. Frances Alda played Madeleine and Paul Althouse appeared as her lover, François; Giorgio Polacco conducted.

While the audience seemed to appreciate Herbert’s effort, reviewers found less to like, the Times saying that it “did not appear…to add much to the distinction of American operatic art, nor to set up a notable landmark in its progress at the Metropolitan Opera House. The only advantage it seemed to possess over the American operas heretofore staged there may perhaps be found in the fact that it is considerably less expensive to produce.” The artists were complimented, but again, the Times found fault with the singers’ diction. (Times, January 25, 1914.) The opera played five times in all, thrice followed by Pagliacci, twice by Don Pasquale. The season also featured the U.S. premieres of Der Rosenkavalier (R. Strauss), L’Amore dei Tre Re (Montemezzi) and Julien (Charpentier) and the company debut of tenor Giovanni Martinelli.

Reginald de Koven was the composer of the popular operetta Robin Hood that appeared on Broadway five times between 1891-1919. Percy Mackaye was a popular playwright and poet who in 1903 had written a successful drama inspired by Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Together the two created The Canterbury Pilgrims, a comic opera based on Mr. MacKaye’s play, which saw the spotlight for the first time at the Met on March 8, 1917, and was given six subsequent performances. In a Times interview, composer and librettist noted the elevated importance of the libretto in opera beginning with the works of Richard Wagner and opined that the failures of earlier American operas had been due to weak libretti. They pointed out that opera was no longer in a time when the music was nothing more than a string of arias written to show off the technical prowess of the divas/os and had little or nor connection to the drama. They felt that the success of American opera was clearly in the hands of both the librettist and the composer. (New York Times, March 4, 1917. (An uncredited letter to the editor published the same day suggested that even more be done by Columbia University, the Met and the Times to further the cause of American opera and suggested that new composers be found, tryout summer seasons arranged and a competition be instituted.)

Reviewers by-and-large were pleased with The Canterbury Pilgrims:

Johannes Sembach played Chaucer and Margarete Ober was Alisoun, the Wife of Bath; Edith Mason was the Prioress and Paul Althouse was the squire; Artur Bodanzky conducted. While all were found to be adequate in the musical and dramatic presentations, it was noted once again that, “the text could rarely be distinguished at all.” (New York Times, March 9, 1917.)

Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride and Zandonai’s Francesca da Rimini received their U.S. premieres over the course of the season and during the April 6 matinee performance of Parsifal word spread that the U.S. had entered the war. German operas would disappear from the repertory for the next three seasons.

Indian Love Call
While in his 20s Charles Wakefield Cadman had developed a keen interest in the tribal music of the Omaha and Winnebago peoples. From 1909 to 1916, he toured the U.S. with the Native American princess Tsianina Redfeather, giving talks and performances based on the music of Native Americans. He collaborated with poet Nelle Richmond Eberhardt to produce hundreds of songs as well as three stage works, including the opera, Shanewis or The Robin Woman. The story is based loosely on the life of Tsianina Redfeather and tells of a young Indian singer who gains the sponsorship of a wealthy California patron but becomes entangled with her patron’s daughter’s fiancé. In his introduction to the opera in the published score, Cadman writes, somewhat defensively:

The Times worried that, while Met audiences were accustoming themselves to native opera, they still were not ready to accept such uniquely “American” subject matter:

The Met presented the premiere of The Robin Woman: Shanewis on March 23, 1918. Sophie Braslau sang the title role (she was an eleventh-hour replacement for Alice Gentle, who missed the entire run); Kathleen Howard played her benefactress, Mrs. J. Asher Everton, Marie Sundelius was Mrs. Everton’s daughter Amy; and Paul Althouse played Amy’s fiancé, Lionel Rhodes, who falls in love with Shanewis; Roberto Moranzoni conducted. Public and press alike were ecstatic over the opera; the opening night audience awarded the creators and performers twenty-one curtain calls. The evening included another American premiere, Henry Gilbert’s ballet The Dance in Place Congo, and Franco Leoni’s opera, The Oracle. The Dance in Place Congo was based on 18th century New Orleans history. Slaves were given a few hours of free time on Sundays and would gather at Place Congo for dancing and love-making. Gradually New Orleans’ white population began to appear and watch, fascinated by the ritual. The Met had given the U.S. premiere of The Oracle during the 1914-15 season. The opera’s story was based on Chester Bailey Fernald’s play, The Cat and the Cherub, set in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Almost completely unknown now, the opera appeared in thirteen seasons at the Met between 1914-33 for a total of 55 performances.

At later performances of Shanewis, it was paired with The Golden Cockerel (by Rimsky-Korsakov, also receiving its U.S. premiere that season) and Pagliacci. Shanewis received five performances in 1917-18 and three in 1918-19, making it the first American opera to be revived in a subsequent season. Shanewis had a remarkable, if short, life and was seen in several American cities. At its Denver, Colorado, premiere in 1924, Tsianina Redfeather Blackstone herself sang the title role, making her operatic debut.

Trittico, Twice
The 1918-19 season’s opening night performance of Saint-Säens Samson et Dalila with Louise Homer and Enrico Caruso coincided with the signing of the Armistice marking the end of WWI. Toward the end of the season Caruso celebrated the 25th anniversary of his stage debut in a gala performance that included L’Elisir d’Amore, Act II; Pagliacci, Act I; Le Prophète, Act IV. The season also featured the premieres of two American one-act operas, The Legend by Joseph Breil and The Temple Dancer by John Hugo. They bowed on March 12, 1919; The Robin Woman: Shanewis rounded out the triple bill, fulfilling Gatti-Casazza’s desire to present an American answer to Puccini’s Il Trittico, which had received its world premiere at the Met earlier the same season.

Pittsburgh-born Joseph Breil abandoned his law studies in Leipzig to become a singer and for almost a decade enjoyed modest success in Germany and the U.S. His experience writing incidental music for the theater led to a migration to Los Angeles where he wrote film scores for some of Hollywood’s earliest blockbusters, notably the silent epics of D.W. Griffith (The Prisoner of Zenda (1913), The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). He eventually became head of the film music department at Triangle Films in Los Angeles. His film scores combined original music with “segments from operatic, symphonic and popular song repertories...and were highly praised for their dramatic aptness.” (Katherine K. Preston and Martin Marks, 'Breil, Joseph Carl', The New Grove Dictionary of Music Online, ed. L. Macy (accessed 25 November 2002).) He wrote five operas, of which The Legend was his second. Jaques Byrne’s libretto tells a story of a daughter caught between her lover and her father who lives a double life as a nobleman and a bandit; the action plays out on a stormy night in the Balkans. The Met’s premiere featured Rosa Ponselle, Paul Althouse, Louis D’Angelo, and Kathleen Howard and was conducted by Maestro Moranzoni.

Connecticut composer John Adam Hugo had enjoyed a career in Europe as a concert pianist but returned to the U.S. in his late 20s to devote his energies to teaching and composing. He wrote three operas, the second of which was The Temple Dancer. The story (to a libretto by Jutta Bell-Ranske takes place in British-occupied India; a Hindu woman falls for a man outside her religion. Grove Dictionary described Hugo’s music, “A picturesque use of modal harmony and exotic percussion lightly flavour the otherwise conventional idiom.” (Michael Meckna, 'Hugo, John Adam', The New Grove Dictionary of Music Online ed. L. Macy (Accessed 25 November 2002).) The Met’s production starred Florence Easton, Morgan Kingston and Carl Schlegel (who wore costumes from a 1912-13 production of The Magic Flute); Moranzoni was again on the podium.

James Gibbons Huneker’s Times review began, “The stage of the Metropolitan Opera House last night was strewn with corpses. Such a naughty holocaust! American composers and librettists seem given over to gore and horrid violence at a time when the world craves the peace that passeth all misunderstanding.” He went on to call The Legend “heavy as unleavened dough.... The Breil score is melodious and commonplace. It ambles along and chokes the action whenever it can.” The Temple Dancer “sounded more like the real thing—in Mr. Hugo’s case, Richard Wagner.” (Times, March 13, 1919.) Huneker complimented Ms. Ponselle and Ms. Easton, although more for their stamina than their capacity to move him; the rest of the cast he found adequate. The triple bill had two performances that season.

Before Elizabeth Taylor, Francis Alda
On January 25, 1920, the New York Times proclaimed, “Rival Stars to Sing Operas by Americans.” It was more media hype than reality; but, in fact, the Chicago Opera was presenting its production of Before Elizabeth Taylor, Francis Alda (another de Koven/MacKaye collaboration) in New York the same week as the Met would give the world premiere of Cleopatra’s Night by Henry Hadley. Fans of American opera must have been giddy!

Hadley was a violinist, conductor and composer and had served as the first conductor of the San Francisco Symphony. Cleopatra’s Night, his fifth opera, was written to a libretto by Alice Leal Pollock, after the story by Théophile Gautier. Hadley had this to say about the opera’s genesis:

Cleopatra’s Night bowed on January 31, 1920, with Frances Alda in the title role and Orville Harrold as Meiamoun; Gennaro Papi conducted. Richard Aldrich proclaimed it the best of Gatti-Casazza’s American efforts, complimenting Hadley for “possessing a true feeling for dramatic movement and expression and contrast, and for the emotional current impelled and directed by the dramatic movement.” But even though Ms. Alda and Mr. Harrold were judged to have sung the music “brilliantly,” he thought they were miscast owing to their physical appearances. (Times, February 1, 1920.) Pagliacci followed Cleopatra’s Night at the premiere; in its eight subsequent performances over this and the following season it was also paired with The Oracle and The Golden Cockerel.

The creators of The King's Henchman: Edward Johnson Deems Taylor, Edna St. Vincent Millay (1927). Metropolitan Opera Archives.

Big Buzz
Deems Taylor was the second American composer to have two operas premiered at the Met. Taylor was also a journalist (critic for the New York World, 1921-25), a consultant to CBS and a commentator for the New York Philharmonic broadcasts between 1936–43. His narrating talents would land him a part in Walt Disney's Fantasia (1940). The media buzz surrounding Taylor’s first Met commission, The King’s Henchman, was at the highest level for any native opera yet given in New York, perhaps in part because of the “absolute silence and secrecy” maintained by the Met up to the official announcement of the premiere only two weeks before it was to occur. (Times, February 7, 1927.) From that date until its debut, the Times featured almost daily progress reports on the opera’s preparations. The opening night was sold out far in advance, necessitating the unprecedented scheduling of a second performance. (New York was also on the edge of its seat over the Broadway premiere of Show Boat, which was postponed as a result of the illness of Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. who was “suffering from bronchitis and severe physical exhaustion” in the course of trying to open his new theater. (Times, February 7, 1927)).

Anticipating the opera, Olin Downes wrote in the Times:

The promise of better results from The King’s Henchman was no doubt elevated by the fact that Edna St. Vincent Millay was recruited to write the libretto. She told the story of the opera, which takes place in 10th century England, thus:

Both Taylor and Millay admitted taking liberties with history, calling their creation part fantasy/part legend. Commentators noted a similarity to Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde in the opera’s setting and the existence of the love triangle. The opera was certainly the grandest American effort yet undertaken by the Met: it contained some thirty solo roles and required a chorus of at least 100 voices. On February 7, the cast was announced to the public: Lawrence Tibbett would be Eadgar; Edward Johnson and Florence Easton would play Aethelwold and Aelfrida; Italian-born conductor Tullio Serafin was slated to lead the opera. George Cehanovsky, in his debut season, played the minor role, Cynric. He would appear in 2,395 performances over the next 40 years, including almost every American opera staged by the Met. After retiring from the stage, he was the Met’s Russian diction coach until his death in 1986 at age 93.

An invitation-only dress rehearsal was given two days before the opening. A glamorous audience got the first view of the opera, including the composer’s wife, actress and playwright Mary Kennedy (their three-month-old daughter Joan had remained at home); Ms. Millay’s husband, E.J. Boissevin, and a sister, Norma Millay, who was singing in Mozart’s La Finta Giardiera at the Mayfair Theater; Broadway stars Ethel Barrymore, Antoinette Perry, Peggy Wood, and Alfred Lunt; composers Walter Damrosch and Henry Hadley, the former “exclaiming after the third-act curtain, ‘There is real emotion in that music!’”; Met stars Pasquale Amato, Maria Jeritza, Lucrezia Bori, Francis Alda, Lauritz Melchior, Giuseppe DeLuca and Artur Bodansky. And of the opera? “One rousing old Anglo-Saxon drinking song by the roistering courtiers of Edgar [sic]... at the close of Act I sent the invited spectators to the lobby smoke-rooms humming and whistling the refrain. The love music of Miss Easton and Edward Johnson under a stout English oak in the second act was enhanced by choral echoes through a forest of birch saplings.... There was a silent moment at the opera’s effective conclusion, then an outburst of applause as Conductor Serafin dismissed all concerned till tomorrow night.” (Times, February 16, 1927.)

On the morning of February 17, 1927, the Times published an anonymous editorial cautioning interested parties not to make assumptions on the Met’s ability to produce a “viable” American opera:

“KING’S HENCHMAN” HAILED AS BEST AMERICAN OPERA

Under the weight of such expectation The King’s Henchman finally bowed on the evening of February 17, 1927. The following morning the opera’s creators and performers awoke (if they had slept) to notices most artists only dream of. Olin Downes’ review appeared on the front page of the Times:

The evening had begun for Mr. Taylor and Ms. Millay on an awkward note. Upon arriving at the opera house to take their places as guests in a box, they were left to wait among “a crowd a standees that had stretched from Broadway around to the carriage doors in both Thirty-ninth and Fortieth Street.” It was some time before Met officials discovered this and found them a place from which to watch their opera. The two were summoned for curtain calls after each act and at the end were presented with laurel wreaths. Mr. Taylor was also given a large silver cigarette cabinet from members of the company. Gatti-Casazza reported that for the first time in its history, the Met had sold out “to the tune of $14,403 exactly.” (Times, February 18, 1927.) The opera was revived in two more seasons for a total of seventeen performances.

The following days’ Times again featured news of Mr. Taylor on its front page:

The reporter gave details of the various costs of producing the opera and hypothesized as to the fees paid Mr. Taylor and Ms. Millay and finally concluded, “Both the composer and the librettist ... were showered with messages of congratulation yesterday.” (Times, February 19, 1927.)

In the midst of all the hype over The King’s Henchman, the Met had made the announcement that it would build a new theater on West Fifty-seventh Street, between Eight and Ninth Avenues, that would seat 5,000 and would also house studios and apartments. Thirty-two parterre boxes would be sold for $145,000 each, giving each purchaser a 1/32nd share in the property. Chairman of the Board, Otto H. Kahn, announced, “Particular attention will be given to securing for every seat a full and unobstructed view of the stage, in which respect the present auditorium is sadly deficient. The increase in seating capacity is planned mainly for the purpose of providing more low-priced and medium-priced seats, the supply of which is quite inadequate in the present house.” The box holders would be given the use of their boxes on Monday evenings and either Thursday evenings or Saturday matinees; the boxes would be sold for the remaining performances of the week. (Times, February 10, 1927.)

The stock market crash of October 29, 1929 brought to an end all discussion of the new theater; however the company continued performing mostly as planned until the 1931-32 season when subscriptions dropped drastically and company members were asked to accept a 10% pay cut. But those looking for analogies to the present day would be hard-pressed. The drop in revenues did not lead to more conservative programming at the Met; in fact, between 1929 and 1941, the company presented six premieres of American operas (discussed herein), six U.S. premieres (including Mussorgsky’s The Fair at Sorochinsky, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sadko, Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra) and eight company premieres (including Verdi’s Luisa Miller, Donizetti’s Linda di Chamounix, Gluck’s Alceste). The 1931-32 season also saw the Met’s first radio broadcast, a Christmas day matinee performance of Hansel and Gretel.

A Look at 1910-1935: Continued