Lost in Thought

Of all native opera, The King's Henchman shot with medieval Saxon moonbeams is the only one ever retained so long as three seasons in the repertoire of the Metropolitan Opera. The Henchman was sung again last week, and out poured another audience filled with that unique combination of patriotism, musical affection, and gratitude for amorous poetry in a language they can understand, which the Henchman was created to supply.

In last week's audience was slim, dark, tense Deems Taylor, who wrote the music. He was, of course, besieged and besought by questioners, because after the Henchman's premiere in 1927 the Metropolitan commissioned Native Taylor to write another native opera. What about that other opera? asked Deems Taylor's friends and the press.

Well, he said, he had been working away for two years. Instead of collaborating again with Poetess Edna St. Vincent Millay he had gone ahead by himself on a libretto, a fantastic tragedy.

Result: the plot, written out, had proved to be so neat intellectually that the music, when he came to write it, got lost emotionally.

"I found I had a situation dominated by thought instead of emotion," he said. "The music would have nothing to say. . . . There was no way I could think my way back into the unsettled emotions."

So he had put native opera No. 11 on the shelf and begun over again. He had heard of a plot "in a novel" and was working on that, with its author. No. he wouldn't say what novel, which novelist, but the time and setting were "here and now" and the novelist is not well known. But, added Native Taylor, "He will be!"

Close friends, ignorant but alert, observed that Composer Taylor was spending a good deal of time with his good friend Elmer Rice, wright of the Pulitzer prizeworthy play, Street Scene.