The King's Henchman: Fifty Years Later

Abstract

Precisely at the time of our bicentennial, Wagnerites observed the centennial of Bayreuth?one hundred years since the production of Wagner's famous Ring cycle. The German composer minced no words when he described the function of opera and drama and what he expected each should do for the other. True, he did not always practice what he preached. For example, despite his pronouncements to the contrary, he never allowed words and music to be of equal significance. Rather, for Wagner as for most composers, music was and remains the most important, possibly the sole, raison d'etre of any good opera. A later composer who, fortunately for us, was able to express himself equally well in words and in music is the American Deems Taylor (1885-1966). A New Yorker, Taylor graduated from New York Univer? sity in 1906, became a war correspondent for the New York Tribune in France during the First World War, a critic on the New York World, editor of Musical America, and later critic for the New York American. His traditional compositions, works like the symphonic poem Through the Looking Glass and the chamber suite Portrait of a Lady, were among the earliest twentieth-century American compositions performed abroad. By 1923, several native dramatists had requested that he provide incidental music for their current Broadway shows, and, in 1925, he became the first American composer commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera to write an opera for them. Aware of the lack of sophistication of American operatic audiences of his time, Deems Taylor was equally astute with regard to the pitfalls of operatic writing generally. Unable to accept the idea that English as a language is unmusical, he wrote in Opera News of 17 December 1960: How anyone could discover the tongue of many of the world's supreme poets to be unsuited to music remains a mystery. He recognized that he must have a poetic language, characters with stature and universality, and dramatic conflict and emotional themes of the sort that can be expanded musically.. . . Music has to be written dramatically,