“It is a broadly painted musical canvas which loses itself just a little too much in the philosophical depths of Jurgen’s nature. The reflective pages in the score are a little longer than the reflective mood of a typical audience. These pages are saturated with feeling, with poetic character, with musical emotion; but they are pages to be read in the shadows of the twilight.... These pages Mr. Taylor has composed with a splendid verve, with brilliant thematic conception, with opulence of color and his own unquenchable spirit of defiant humor. There is music in every page, music that should bring gladness to the American music lover in that it was made by an American.” IX No better introduction to a discussion of _The King’s Henchman_ could be found than another quotation from Mr. Gilman, written in the “Tribune” on the occasion of the opera’s première at the Metropolitan: “Thus we came to the end of the best American opera we have ever heard, and so easily the best of the ten produced by Mr. Gatti-Casazza at the Metropolitan that there is none other in the running. Mr. Taylor has woven a deft and often lovely sounding score about a superb poetic text—a text pithy and glamorous and full of character; rich in humor and dramatic force, rich in imagery that is often startling in its beauty and its swift felicity. And this text is apt for voices or for viols. It clamors for vocal utterance and for enforcement by the instruments of the mirroring orchestra. “Mr. Taylor’s score is in the worthiest sense theatrically planned and developed. It is obvious that he wrote with his eye on the stage, with his intelligence responsive to its tyrannous requirements. Furthermore, he has given musical voice to English words which, sung from the stage, are not only heard, but are expressive, and fitting, and often beautiful. The music, as music, “sounds”; it fills the ear, is richly textured, mellifluous, has grace and movement and flexibility. It is the writing of an expert craftsman, an artist of sensibility and warm responsiveness.” For her libretto, Miss Millay went to the England of the ninth century for her setting, and, in authentic Anglo-Saxon verbiage tells us the story of Eadgar, King of England, a widower who wishes a second wife. Like King Mark in _Tristan_, he dispatches a trusted retainer, Aethelwold, to bring to him Aelfrida, daughter of the Thane of Devon, of whose beauty he has heard. Like Tristan and like John Alden, Aethelwold falls in love with the lady himself, and tragedy is inevitable. It has often been remarked that the weaker the libretto, the better the opera. If any proof were needed to challenge so obvious a fallacy, _The King’s Henchman_ provides it, for here is a poetic drama which of itself stands in perfect security. In the “Tribune” Elinor Wylie wrote, after reading the poem: