New Opera

What lies in store for patrons of the Metropolitan Opera behind the quizzical title, The King's Henchman, remains entirely to be seen and heard. But it heads the prospectus of Director Gatti-Casazza and there was a stir last year when its authors, Composer Deems Taylor and Poetess Edna St. Vincent Millay, were commissioned to contrive an all-native opera. The music is finished; Deems Taylor is in Europe. And last week came news that, despite the ravages of a long illness, the pale and slender young librettist had finished a first draft of her end of the work. She had begun it in her Greenwich Village home ("narrowest house in Manhattan"), abandoned it during a breakdown, lately brought it to completion at a retreat in the woods of Maine. A lightsome, fanciful opera this Henchman will surely be, judging by the quality of Deems Taylor's compositions to date (Through the Looking Glass, The Siren Song, The Chambered Nautilus, etc.). A joyous, spirited and perhaps abandoned opera it is likely to be, if Poetess Millay has written as she was wont. Of burning her candle at both ends for the "lovely light" it gave, she used to rhyme. She has raced barefoot at dawn through the Bois de Boulogne, and elsewhere. When she married Eugene Boissevain, Manhattan importer, in 1923, it was with a fillip at destiny's nose, for next day she was to enter a hospital for a grave operation.